Guest Commentaries

Over the past five years, Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO George Halvorson, who will retire at the end of this year, sent a weekly letter to the 180,000 people who work for the nation's largest integrated healthcare delivery system. Every letter celebrated a particular success within the...
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When superstorm Sandy slammed into the New York metropolitan region, healthcare delivery was immediately challenged in unprecedented ways. Major hospitals, including those serving our poorest and most vulnerable New Yorkers, were severely damaged and forced to evacuate. Destruction to homes and...
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The passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and implementation of Medicare's value-based purchasing program have thrust the issue of patient experience to the top of the healthcare agenda in the U.S.
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“We all know we need to be careful stewards of our healthcare dollars. But if we can't get at the price information, it's just not doable." It is a complaint and concern we hear frequently working with large employers and other healthcare purchasers, such as state public employee and retiree...
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It's a familiar refrain—uncertainty, confusion, pressure, frustration. I often feel like a broken record when I'm describing our members' assessment of their current professional lives and the environment for medical practices. The ongoing Medicare payment uncertainty, steady increases in...
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Any hospital executive knows the argument that healthcare in America is undermined by a reimbursement model that pays for procedures instead of outcomes.
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"Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare” signals to viewers that healthcare in this country is broken. The traditional delivery model no longer works. As President Abraham Lincoln once said, “We must think anew and act anew.” That's what healthcare needs now—a...
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At the center of so many critical issues in healthcare today lies the electronic health record. It's driving the meaningful-use regulations, ICD-10 implementation, updates to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the most basic of all questions—how to reduce the cost of...
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I've spent my career as a hospital administrator talking about the need for institutional values, but it's not always easy to walk the walk, especially when a crisis erupts and the most expedient response is often the unethical one—I learned that the day we lost a corpse.
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The federal government has targeted billions of dollars of savings for the Medicare program by reducing the number of preventable readmissions.Financial penalties to hospitals with excessive readmission rates begin Oct. 1.
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