Cover Story news and information

A growing number of experts fear the rising popularity of high-deductible insurance plans could backfire and undermine the accountable care movement.
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The media-fueled saga of 10-year-old cystic fibrosis patient Sarah Murnaghan ended happily last week for her and her family. But the successful legal and publicity campaign that allowed her to leap to the front of the waiting list for a life-saving lung transplant highlights an underlying dilemma.
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The Obama administration and health policy experts have been touting last year's decline in Medicare 30-day hospital readmissions as evidence that delivery and payment reforms designed to prevent unnecessary repeat visits were starting to succeed.
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Much has changed in the years since the Institute of Medicine published To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, companion reports released in 1999 and 2001 that sounded the alarm about high rates of adverse events and the urgent need to adopt proven best practices in healthcare.
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The movement to standardize medical practice patterns, a key component of improving quality, is still a work in progress as hospital officials seeking to install common protocols continue to encounter pockets of resistance among
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Prodded by federal and state regulations, hospitals have made significant strides to combat hospital-acquired infections. Even so, some say more work needs to be done to address infections that occur outside the intensive-care unit and that hospitals should...
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Though early adopters are gaining experience with accountable care organizations, evidence of their impact on quality remains limited.
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Medicare officials and policy experts long have thought that hospitals should do a better job of preventing the need for patients to be readmitted soon after their initial discharge.
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When Dr. Rich Zane arrived last year at the University of Colorado Hospital, he found an emergency room built to handle 25,000 patients a year but was seeing 60,000.
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Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital in Whittier, Calif., is laying the groundwork for its next big advances in information technology.
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