News & Updates from HHS
HHS and its agencies including CMS, ONC, and AHRQ are reporting these news items, events, updates and deadlines for providers and hospitals. ICD-10 compliance date is October 1, 2015.
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2015 AHRQ Research Conference
The AHRQ Research Conference is an important opportunity to share the results and impact of AHRQ-sponsored research, data and tools, and talk about the many ways this work is used to improve health care.
A New Tool to Analyze Hospital Discharge Data
By Richard Kronick PhD – As part of AHRQ’s mission to help the public understand and use health care data, I’m excited to announce the launch of a new Web tool that allows analysis of the latest State-by-State information on hospital discharges.
Twitter #saveAHRQ Hashtag Highlights
Following up and continuing Dr. Hersh’s In Defense of AHRQ: A Key Component of Healthcare Delivery Science conversation to save AHRQ from being defunded. The…
In Defense of AHRQ: A Key Component of Healthcare Delivery Science
By William Hersh – The Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality is an unheralded government agency that performs a great deal of healthcare-related research out of proportion to its small size. Just browsing through the AHRQ web site makes it clear that agency does a great breadth of work for its annual $400 million budget.
New AHRQ-funded Centers to Study Health Systems’ Efforts to Disseminate PCOR
By Richard Kronick, Ph.D. – On Monday, June 15, 2015, while attending AcademyHealth’s Annual Research Meeting in Minneapolis, I was excited to announce AHRQ’s plans to fund three Centers of Excellence to study how health care systems promote evidence-based practices in delivering care.
Hospital Uses AHRQ Resources to Cut Readmissions, Promote Patient Self-Management
Memorial Hospital, a 97-bed community hospital in Marysville, Ohio, uses strategies from AHRQ’s Re-Engineered Discharge (RED) toolkit to help newly discharged patients follow their treatment plans and improve their health in order to avoid readmission to the hospital.
AHRQ on Alert Fatigue
By William Hyman – Alert fatigue as it is now described arises from the excessive or otherwise ineffectual presentations of advisories while using an EHR. Alert fatigue parallels another common problem which is audible alarm fatigue from medical devices. In both of these more is not necessarily better, and might be worse.
Patient Safety Measures and Safety Culture Improving, but Gaps Remain
By Richard Kronick, PhD – The health care industry wasn’t an early adopter of the well-known mantra that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” But measuring and reporting performance on indicators of patient safety and quality have contributed to some marked improvements in recent years, according to the newly released 2014 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).