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An initiative to cut down on the use of the emergency department (ED) for non-emergent care by educating patients on more appropriate levels of care resulted in an 11.5% decline in ED use in three years by members covered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, with headquarters in Jacksonville.
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In the first 10 months of the Heart Failure Transition Care Program at Tucson, AZ-based Carondelet Health Network, case managers, called nurse partners, prevented hospital readmissions 14 times while managing the care of 62 high-risk patients.
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Patients at high risk for a second stroke had a lower risk of stroke and death when treated with aggressive medical therapy than patients who received a brain stent in addition to aggressive medical therapy, according to a nationwide clinical trial that included specialists in Stony Brook University School of Medicine's Departments of Neurology and Neurological Surgery, Stony Brook, NY.
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Women with a deleterious gene mutation are diagnosed with breast cancer almost eight years earlier than relatives of the previous generation who also had the disease and/or ovarian cancer, according to new research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX.
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Making written handouts readily available to clinicians interacting with patients is an important element of patient education.
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Whether chemotherapy is given before or after breast-conserving therapy (BCT) does not have an impact on long-term local-regional outcomes, suggesting treatment success is due more to biologic factors than chemotherapy timing, according to a study1 by researchers at The University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX.
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Payers are asking for more preauthorizations, even for services that previously didn't require them, reports Connie Campbell, director of patient access of Mercy Medical Center in Oshkosh, WI.
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Despite Sentinel Event Alerts and partnerships between The Joint Commission and professional organizations, wrong-site surgeries continue at a national rate as high as 40 times per week, according to Mark Chassin, MD, MPP, MPH, president of The Joint Commission and the Center for Transforming Healthcare.
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The final "Patient Blood Management Performance Measures," formerly named the "Blood Management (BM) Measure Set," have been placed in The Joint Commission Library of Other Measures and are available for all healthcare organizations to use in internal quality improvement initiatives.
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A woman stole paper surgery schedules for about 4,500 patients at an Alabama hospital and used the names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers to commit identity fraud, according to a media report.
