Nursing unions wanting higher staffing ratios have more ammunition thanks to a new study concluding that increasing nurse staffing levels could help hospitals avoid Medicare penalties for avoidable readmissions.
The study covered readmissions of Medicare patients who suffered heart attacks, heart failure or pneumonia. It appears in the October issue of Health Affairs.
Read more »
If Congress manages to get the government restarted and avert the debt ceiling crisis, lawmakers may have just enough time to renew their
10-year tradition of "kicking the can" on finding a replacement for the Medicare sustainable growth-rate payment formula.
During a "Washington Update" session, Jeb Shepard and Jennifer Gasperini of the Medical Group Management Association's government affairs staff told attendees at the association's annual conference in San Diego how legislative and regulatory action and inaction may affect the medical practices they run.
Read more »
Stephen Nuckolls, CEO of Coastal Carolina Health Care, New Bern, N.C., shared some lessons at the Medical Group Management Association annual conference yesterday from his organization's experience in running a Medicare accountable care organization.
He said that when his organization was forming its 50-provider accountable care organization, hiring a consultant was money well-spent, but outsourcing the staff of its after-hours call center was not. The consultant offered concrete steps to advance the ACO goal of keeping people out of the hospital and emergency department. But the employees of the contracted call center company worked against that goal.
Read more »
New research calls into question the validity of using post-operative blood clot rates as a metric of hospital quality. According to a study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, rates of venous thromboembolism—a term that includes pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis—could be skewed by surveillance bias.
Such bias can occur in hospitals that have more expansive screening criteria for VTE, including the testing of asymptomatic patients, or in hospitals that rely more heavily on imaging for diagnosis, said the authors, who analyzed data from the CMS' Hospital Compare, the American Hospital Association and Medicare claims.
Read more »
Months after the latest trial of a possible HIV vaccine were halted because it was ineffective, newly published details suggest researchers and advocates made important strides with some the country's hardest-hit and difficult-to-reach populations.
The study, published in the Oct. 7 online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, found the two-year trial of an experimental HIV vaccine did not prevent HIV among participants, with 41 cases of infection among those who received the vaccine compared with 30 cases among those who took the placebo.
Read more »
The government shutdown isn't stopping Food and Drug Administration advisory committee meetings scheduled this month, according to drug and device manufacturers.
Some analysts warned that the shutdown could limit the FDA's panel discussions, postpone meetings and ultimately delay product launches and spook investors.
Read more »
Three winners will split more than $3 million in prize money offered by the Veterans Affairs Department to upgrade the scheduling software module of its VistA electronic health-record system.
The $1,825,000 first-prize winner is a consortium of MedRed, a Washington, D.C.-based software development company; BT Americas, an IT services company based in El Segundo, Calif.; and the VistA Expertise Network, a programmer's network based in Seattle. Its entry, Health eTime, has been under development since last fall solely for the contest, said Krishna Dave, contract manager for MedRed. Whether the software will become part of VistA, and whether it will be proprietary or free and open source has yet to be determined, Dave said. “We are waiting for some guidance from the VA on what the next steps are, whether there will be procurement,” she said.
Read more »
The federal government's jobs report last month left many eager to find out if the next report would again show weak gains or even losses in hospital employment in spite of durable growth in the healthcare sector at large.
But anyone who keeps close tabs on healthcare employment woke up this morning—the first Friday of October—without the monthly fix of federal jobs data thanks to the government shutdown in Washington.
Read more »
There has been a lot of complaining lately about the lack of interoperability in healthcare information technology and how the inability of computers to communicate with each other impedes organizing population health-improvement systems. But two Southern California organizations that just announced a deal to open a string of primary-care health centers said interoperability concerns will not stand in the way.
Southern California's MemorialCare Health System and UC Irvine Health announced the collaboration Oct. 2. Although the hospitals and medical groups of the two systems use a mix of products that includes Allscripts, NextGen Healthcare as well as both Epic's hospital and ambulatory systems, organization executives say interfaces can be created to let them all talk to each other.
Read more »
The advent of recovery auditing in Medicare has led to a sharp increase in administrative appeals by hospitals, creating administrative logjams but not necessarily leading to victories for providers complaining about denied payments.
Between 2008 and 2012, the number of administrative appeals annually involving inpatient hospital care skyrocketed from 46,000 to 284,000, according to a report out today from HHS' Office of the Inspector General.
Read more »
A scheduled House committee hearing on the Food and Drug Administration's progress toward implementing a federal law requiring it to develop a regulatory strategy for health information technology was postponed Thursday, as the government shutdown continued into its third day.
Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, was scheduled to testify before the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the Food and Drug Administration Safety Innovation Act.
Read more »
