-
Although tuberculosis has reached an all-time low in the United States, the persistence of TB globally including extensively drug-resistant (XDR)-TB means that U.S. hospitals must remain vigilant to prevent spread of the disease, public health experts say.
-
Patient access departments are, without question, "under the microscope" in this recession. Managers need to prove their competency and show the impact of the department on the hospital's bottom line, while facing the threat of budget cuts that could reduce staffing, technology, and education resources.
-
Use data to deflect unfair complaints about accessWhen someone has a complaint about patient access either an individual staff person or the department overall how you respond can "make or break" what happens next.
-
An ancillary department repeatedly insists that patient access staff are entering the wrong orders. If this accusation was made about your department, what would your response be?
-
Do you want to discourage staff, send a registrar's morale plummeting, and as a result, deal with higher turnover in your department? If not, don't make these morale-busting mistakes:
-
Although workflow management is not a new phenomena in the business world, it is relatively new in revenue cycle operations, especially in patient access operations, says John Woerly, RHIA, CHAM, senior manager at Accenture in Indianapolis.
-
Joan S. Braveman, director of patient access and financial services at Tallahassee (FL) Memorial HealthCare, says that her department is in the process of doing "complete re-education" on the Medicare Secondary Payer questionnaire.
-
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to prevent infection with carbapenem-resistant Wnterobacteri-aceae (CRE) in general and carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae (CRKP) in particular include the following recommendations:
-
Findings from the first in-depth study of patient sharing show that hospitals share large numbers of patients with other acute care facilities without knowing it. The findings do not bode well for containing emerging organisms like carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae because they suggest that once a pathogen enters a region, it may soon be shared among many area hospitals.
-
Epidemiologists and computer scientists at the University of Iowa have collaborated to create a wireless electronic badge that monitors hand hygiene compliance. The study was unveiled recently in San Diego at the annual meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA).
