Medicare’s Readmission Penalties Hit New High
By Jordan Rau – The federal government’s readmission penalties on hospitals will reach a new high as Medicare withholds more than half a billion dollars in payments over the next year.
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Web Tool Reduced Medical Missteps During Hospital-Shift Changes: Study Says
By Shefali Luthra – It’s 4 p.m., and if you’re a hospital patient, that could be one of the most critical times of the day. Your doctor’s shift just ended, and someone new will take over your care. How these professionals communicate could have major repercussions for your recovery. Those shift changes, also known as handoffs, are prime opportunities for key information about a patient’s condition to get lost in the shuffle.
Many Well-Known Hospitals Fail To Score 5 Stars In Medicare’s New Ratings
By Jordan Rau – The federal government released its first overall hospital quality rating recently, slapping average or below average scores on many of the nation’s best-known hospitals while awarding top scores to dozens of unheralded ones. CMS rated 3,617 hospitals on a one- to five-star scale, angering the hospital industry.
US News and World Report Ranks Top Hospitals
For the twenty-seventh year, U.S. News and World Report released the #BestHospitals list. The 2016-17 rankings include hospitals from around the country known for their…
Helping Hospitals with Interoperability: Taking a Technologist’s Perspective with Joel Rydbeck
By Sarianne Gruber – At the Inforum 2016, I meet Joel Rydbeck and learn how their software and cloud services help their clients advance towards interoperability. A very timely conversation given ONC’s release of two measures addressing ‘widespread interoperability’, as required by MACRA.
Slow Progress on Medicare’s Goal of 50 Percent Value-Based Reimbursement by 2018
Fewer than a quarter of U.S. hospitals are on track to hit the Obama Administration’s 2018 goal of providing at least half their patient care through so-called “value-based” arrangements – structures that tie reimbursement from Medicare to the quality of care patients receive.
Critics Of Medicare’s Overall Hospital Star Rating Push For Changes
By Jordan Rau – Over the past decade, the federal government has publicized 115 different ways to measure medical quality in hospitals, from assessing wait times in emergency rooms and noise levels outside hospital rooms to tracking blood clots in surgical patients. But the latest effort, to combine dozens of metrics into one patient-friendly quality indicator, has proven the most contentious.
Medicare Pays Bonuses To 231 Hospitals With Lower Quality Because Of Cheaper Costs
By Jordan Rau – The federal government paid bonuses to 231 hospitals with subpar quality because their patients tend to be less expensive for Medicare, new research shows. The bonuses are small, generally a fraction of a percent of their Medicare payments. Nonetheless, rewarding hospitals of mediocre quality was hardly the stated goal…
For Hospitals, Prestige Leads To Profits
By Shefali Luthra – When it comes to hospitals, which benefit most from high health care prices? It may sound counter-intuitive, but a group of not-for-profit hospitals appear to be among those doing the best business.