Process Improvement

Right now, either hospital medical records departments or medical group practice administrators typically end up collecting quality data, a costly and time-consuming exercise which only gets more taxing from year to year as health plans, state and federal regulators demand more. According to a new study by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the right information technology could ease the strain, but only if all of the stakeholders agree on common data standards. In the …

A new study has concluded that patients who wait longer than a month to get treatment are more likely to die within six months of their medical visit. Researchers found that patients who waited 31 days or more to visit medical facilities were 20 percent more likely to die during a six-month follow-up period. The study, which appeared in the journal Health Services Research, found that the effect was particularly noticeable for elderly patients. On the positive side, the study …

A group of top officials with the British National Health Service are visiting Cleveland Regional Medical Center to learn more about the hospital's pay-for-performance program. The British officials are hoping to pick up tips on how to better run its existing pay-for-performance program, which has been so successful that physician bonuses busted the program's budget during the first year. Cleveland Regional was a top performer in the first phase of the …

A new analysis by The Joint Commission has concluded that hospitals have significantly improved the care they deliver for heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia over the past few years. The report, which looked at how hospitals cared for these conditions between 2002 and 2005, found that hospitals steadily improved their performance in following guidelines for these conditions during this period. For example, it found that in 2005, ninety-six percent of heart attack patients got …

A new study by three St. Paul hospitals has found that the area's facilities could treat 2,733 more psych patients per year if mental health patients had adequate outpatient treatment options. The study, backed by United Hospital, Regions Hospital and St. Joseph's Hospital, tracked psych bed usage at 10 Twin Cities hospitals during fall 2006. The study found that roughly 40 to 50 patients …

A broad study of New Jersey heart attack patients has found that those who went to the hospital on weekends often got less aggressive treatment. Weekend heart attack patients were slightly more likely to die, as well, according to an analysis of care for 231,164 heart attack patients admitted to New Jersey hospitals from 1987 to 2002. During 1999 to 2002, 12.9 percent of weekend patients died, versus 12 percent of weekday patients. This could be, in part, due to variations in treatment: …

Even if they're insured, many heart patients don't get adequate follow-up care, according to research published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The research, which followed 2,498 patients recovering from heart attacks, found that one in five patients felt they couldn't afford follow-up care, and one in eight didn't buy medicine due to the cost. The kicker: more than two-thirds of the patients who reported being worried about expenses actually had …

While most physicians provide care that falls within established guidelines, about one in ten provided more services than patients needed, according to a GAO study of recent Medicare data. The researchers found that inefficient physicians accounted for 10 percent of the primary care physician population and 2 to 6 percent of specialists.

To establish the efficiency measures, GAO researchers looked at the physician profiling systems used by 10 health care purchasing organizations. …

A new report by the Ohio Department of Health has given public health officials a new target to consider. The report, which focused on the state's 210 hospitals and 966 nursing homes, concluded that there were about 14,300 cases of Clostridium difficile infections last year in the state's healthcare facilities. Tracking this bug has become particularly important as the mortality rate from such infections has climbed. C. diff.-related deaths in Ohio have shot up 325 percent between the …

The results are in from Indiana's first in-depth look at medical errors made in its hospitals and healthcare facilities. The Indiana Medical Error Reporting System, which requires facilities to share information on 27 "serious reportable events," completed its first full year last year. According to the data reported to the state, 77 serious medical errors occurred at the state's 287 hospitals and healthcare facilities last year. Seventy-two of the 77 errors occurred at hospitals, …