Wachter
At the sixth International Conference on Diagnostic Error in Medicine on Wednesday, Dr. Robert Wachter gave a quick history of patient safety and quality improvement but noted that activity to reduce diagnostic errors was noticeably absent from the movement's timeline.
“There's still not a lot of action promoting this agenda,” said Wachter, professor and associate chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. He made the remark after describing events that took place after the Institute of Medicine published “To Err is Human,” its report on medical errors, in 1999.
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The humble stretcher used for transporting patients has gone high-tech and high-cost. The average price paid for stretchers jumped 20% over the past year as more hospitals purchased costlier models that have complex features, such as motorized drives or compatibility with X-ray imaging devices, according to the Modern Healthcare/ECRI Institute Technology Price Index. But one expert raised questions about whether the technological advances are worth the price.
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Alexander
Seventeen Senate Republicans are asking HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to again delay the looming implementation of more stringent criteria for the federal electronic health record incentive payment program. Their request follows a plea to providers from a leading EHR vendor to ask the government for more time.
Their call came in a letter Tuesday to Sebelius requesting an extension of the Stage 2 meaningful-use requirements by one year “for providers who need extra time to meet the new requirements. Providers who are ready to attest to Stage 2 in 2014 should be able to do so with current policy,” the senators said.
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There are more than 200 mobile healthcare applications co-branded with healthcare organizations available on the two main online app marketplaces, Google Play and the Apple App Store, a new research report shows.
“The box we had around this was the hospital's name—it had to be clearly designated as an app from them,” said Brian Dolan, managing editor and co-founder of MobiHealthNews.com, a website that covers the burgeoning mobile health app space. “It was built for them or built by them and it had to be for patients. We wanted this to be about patient engagement.”
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Hoven
“To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of private practice medicine have been greatly exaggerated,” Dr. Ardis Dee Hoven, president of the American Medical Association, said in a news release touting the findings of a recent survey that indicates how the trend toward hospital employment of physicians may be overstated.
According to the AMA's new Physician Practice Benchmark Survey, 53.2% of physicians were self-employed in 2012, 41.8% were employed and 5% were independent contractors.
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The Delaware Regional Extension Center is batting better than a thousand.
It is the first of the 62 health information technology extension centers funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to meet its target of helping 1,000 healthcare providers across the finishing line as “meaningful users” of electronic health-record systems under the federal EHR incentive payment program.
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Most of the people who come to the emergency room with gunshot wounds have no insurance, and if they're admitted as inpatients, hospitals will spend an average of $23,500 caring for them, according to a new study of gun trauma and healthcare costs.
But the study from the Urban Institute found that gunshot victims' uninsured status may affect their care. “Uninsured victims of firearm assaults appear to have different treatment when they arrive at the ED. Their ED visits are the most expensive, they are admitted for inpatient care less often, and their treatment, once admitted, appears to be less intensive,” the study says. “The numbers indicate that some hospitals may be making treatment decisions based on the insurance status of the patient rather than the patient's condition.”
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A rule that would require medical devices to be marked with unique identifiers is still stuck in the regulatory process, and the delay is drawing complaints from lawmakers and health systems.
Four House lawmakers sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, which has yet to release the final rule for the unique device identification system, urging OMB to provide a status update. It has been six years since Congress mandated the development of a device identification system.
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Two new studies have put a price tag on healthcare services considered of little benefit to patients. In both reports, researchers raised questions about the role that healthcare providers play in delivering potentially unnecessary care.
One study examined the cost of care for patients who were taken by ambulance to the most sophisticated, well-equipped trauma centers despite injuries that required far less intensive care.
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The benefits of expanding Medicaid coverage to homeless and chronically ill adults under healthcare reform may seem obvious. But enrolling this population and providing them with healthcare services will not be easily achieved, a survey published in Health Affairs shows.
The survey, which included more than 700 homeless adults enrolled in a housing and healthcare effort between 2004 and 2009, found adults reported “serious physical and mental health conditions, suggesting that chronically homeless adults have a wide variety of health needs that require a broad range of health services.”
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A large hospital consortium and two health systems have launched a "big data" pilot project to automatically extract claims and clinical data from their information technology systems.
UHC, the Chicago-based University HealthSystem Consortium of 118 academic medical centers and nearly 300 affiliated hospitals, is collaborating with NYU Langone Medical Center in New York and the Cleveland Clinic on the project.
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