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Social work services provide an important link between ambulatory and inpatient providers and health care clients. Social workers assist patients in finding available and appropriate resources, help with financial issues, arrange transportation for patients, and conduct many more enabling tasks.
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Under expanded safe harbors to anti-kickback statutes, physicians are now allowed to accept donations of electronic prescribing software, electronic health records software, and training services from hospitals and health plans, says the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
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At Fairview Hospital, a small critical access facility in Great Barrington, MA, a decision was made in spring 2005 to switch to an integrated system for performance measurement and improvement.
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At Sacred Heart Hospital in Allentown, PA, patient-centered collaboration between the case management department and other areas, such as quality, nursing, inpatient and outpatient providers, the residency program, and the legal and finance departments, has had a dramatic impact on quality.
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With the growing emphasis on pay for performance initiatives, quality professionals are seeing their roles change very quickly.
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If you don't measure quality accurately, your organization could face dire consequences ranging from financial problems to plummeting patient satisfaction scores.
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Lack of consensus on how to measure hand hygiene compliance has made this a daunting challenge for quality professionals. To address this, the Joint Commission has partnered with infection control organizations to identify how to measure compliance with hand hygiene guidelines.
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More than a decade of research in aviation has shown how critical effective teamwork is to flight safety. Both the armed services and commercial aviation organizations have standardized training systems in place for teamwork.
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Having made infection control and patient safety top priorities in recent years, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations is now taking on the thorny issue of flu vaccinations for health care workers in a new standard that becomes effective next year.
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How would you like an extra $500,000 to spend on quality projects at your organization? Its no secret which hospitals are on the receiving end of significant reimbursement, now that the long-awaited quality data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS)/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration Project have been released.
