Sabriya Rice

Just six months after taking over the head office at Presence Health system, CEO Michael Englehart is rethinking being "Lean." The Chicago-based system's 11 hospitals had been practicing a manufacturing industry management style known as Lean. The goal was to address challenges to delivering high-value care.

The healthcare providers will merge resources for transplant and inpatient services, physician education and clinical research in the New York City area. They will also open a free-standing dialysis center where nurses will instruct patients on using in-home dialysis equipment.

Not all women initiate recommended breast cancer treatment despite the survival benefits associated with it. A new study in JAMA Oncology suggests their delays in treatment might, in part, be related to whether or not they use complementary and alternative medicines.

The nation could have saved an estimated $73 billion from 2010 to 2012 if clinicians had more frequently prescribed alternatives to brand-name drugs, according to a new study. The total out-of pocket savings for patients would have been about $25 billion.

When a medical error results in death, it's not reported explicitly as a cause of death to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or on death certificates, and it is not easily tracked through the ICD coding system.

The CMS is preparing to cull the number of quality metrics that physicians have to report as it rolls three quality-incentive programs into what Congress conceived as a more harmonized framework.

Just six months after taking over the head office at Presence Health system, CEO Michael Englehart is rethinking being "Lean." The Chicago-based system's 11 hospitals had been practicing a manufacturing industry management style known as Lean. The goal was to address challenges to delivering high-value care.

It's often said that death rates and costs are lower and outcomes are better at facilities that perform high volumes of a procedure. But a report this week challenges that assumption and says more research is needed.

The volume of measures that exist, promulgated by lack of alignment and poor coordination, has created an environment of measure madness, “consuming precious resources that could be directed toward meaningful efforts to continuously enhance quality and patient safety,” according to a report from the Healthcare Association of New York State.

The CMS postponed the release of new overall quality star ratings for U.S. hospitals one day before their scheduled reveal, bowing to pressure from lawmakers and industry stakeholders. The ratings are now slated to be published in July, the CMS said in an e-mail to hospitals Wednesday.

The ECRI Institute's third annual list of the "Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns" finds hospitals continue to struggle with long-standing safety concerns. Many safety woes also exist in ambulatory, nursing home and other care settings, according to authors of the report.

Misconceptions about what constitutes a breakthrough drug and how the approval process works may lead to certain therapies being over-prescribed and patients being let down by the overstated benefits, according to the authors of a JAMA study published Tuesday.