Healthcare Administration

Wrong-site surgeries happen or almost happen every other day in Pennsylvania healthcare organizations, says a new study. And, researchers suggest, those findings mirror what's taking place in other states.

Officials of the Pennsylvania Safety Authority, which conducted the survey, said in a 30-month time period stretching from June 2004 to December 2006, they received 427 near misses or reports of wrong-site surgeries. Of those, 253 were near misses. Of the remaining surgeries, …

The issue of emergency department preparedness is not a new one, and CMS is getting heat from Congress for not taking action on the problem. In recent years, lower ED capacity and higher patient demand has placed strain on the system even under the best of circumstance, and officials fear EDs are woefully unprepared to handle …

Most consumers assume hospital meals will be bad--right up there with airline food. And in the past, that's usually what they got. But increasingly, as hospitals work to please consumers with hotel- and retail-style amenities, hospital food is going upscale. Over the past several years, hospitals have begun offering a "liberalized" diet, giving patients the option to eat what they want.

These new offerings are built with the idea that patients are more likely to stick with a …

It's grim knowledge, but necessary. A new study suggests as many as 5 percent of all hospital and nursing home patients are infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) at any given time. If accurate, this stat would indicate MRSA is eight to 11 times more common than previously determined by other research. The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology sent surveys to more than 11,000 members, asking them to pick a day between Oct. 1 …

After surviving years of scandals over questionable care, Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital may be out of time. California regulators have set plans to revoke the hospital's license, something they haven't done to any hospital in the state since 2004. The hospital can appeal the decision, a process which could take as long as a year, but at least some of the county supervisors aren't sure they should fight. Two of the five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors say …

While the state of Louisiana would like to put a 484-bed teaching and research hospital in downtown New Orleans, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development isn't sure it's a good idea. HUD has agreed to release $74 million to buy land and prepare a design for the next Charity Hospital, which sat in downtown New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. But HUD isn't thrilled about the idea of giving the state an additional $150 million or so to build the hospital. In a …

Providers in Houston are going mano a mano over claims that a dominant health system drove a physician-owned hospital out of business. Attorneys for the now-closed Houston Town & Country Hospital say that Memorial Hermann Healthcare System, which includes 16 hospitals across the Houston metro, asked insurers to boycott the startup facility. Houston Town & Country closed in 2006, having been open less than 18 months. Some of the physicians who took part in the Town & Country …

Policy experts meeting at a Mayo Clinic-sponsored forum are recommending some significant changes to health plan reimbursement practices which they say could improve care and reduce costs. The experts, who met this week at Dartmouth, are suggesting that plans institute shared decision making programs for major elective surgery, in which medical centers are awarded bonuses for involving patients effectively. Another of their proposals is to develop a model for a single "chronic condition …

Want to avoid bad debt? One way to do that is to simply collect what you're owed as quickly and aggressively as possible--and that's what many hospitals are doing. Increasingly, hospitals are opting to collect co-pays and deductibles at the point of care or soon thereafter, hoping to stem rising tides of unpaid bills. They're determining how much to ask for, in many cases, by analyzing not only the patient's coverage but their personal financial situation as well. Vanderbilt University …

A former division chair at UT Southwestern Medical Center is suing the academic medical center under the Texas whistleblower act, contending that it booted him from his endowed position after he complained that patients weren't getting proper care at its teaching hospital. In the suit, Dr. Larry Gentilello contends that trauma residents and Parkland Memorial Hospital have been performing surgery without proper supervision on the poor and uninsured patients typically seen at the county …