quality of care

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How A Simple New Tool Helps Doctors Care For Patients -- After They Leave The Office

Lisa Wirthman | Forbes | May 11, 2016

We live in an increasingly connected world, but patients who receive treatment from multiple doctors and healthcare systems still face a lack of coordination in their care, which can put their health outcomes at risk. PatientPing is working to help doctors collaborate and create a more consistent experience for patients with simple technology that connects healthcare providers across facilities, systems and geographies...

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How Community Health Centers Support Patient-Centered Care

Sara Heath | Patient Engagement HIT | August 21, 2017

Each year, HHS celebrates Community Health Centers week. It is a time where the agency recognizes the impact community health centers have on patient-centered care and how they promote access to care in vulnerable or medically underserved populations...

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How EHRs Tied Up Physician Time in 2015

Troy Parks | AMA Wire | December 11, 2015

As the year draws to a close, we’re taking a look at five of the topics that struck a special chord with the medical community throughout 2015. Burdensome regulations and technology have led physicians to spend considerable time struggling with their electronic health records (EHR). Fortunately, policymakers and health IT developers are starting to take note...

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How to Fix the EHR Mess

Matthew Hahn, MD. | MatthewHahnMD.com | June 12, 2017

Computers, more specifically, electronic health records (EHRs), will someday revolutionize the practice of medicine. In fact, successful computerization of medical care is the most critical step necessary to transform the American health-care system from its current sorry state to the 21st century system of our dreams. It is ironic, then, that today EHRs represent one of the worst problems plaguing medical professionals. At this point, many physicians would say that EHRs have created more problems than they have fixed. The most important question is how do we get from where we are to where we need to be?...

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IBM Pitched Its Watson Supercomputer as a Revolution in Cancer Care. It’s Nowhere Close

Casey Ross | STAT | September 5, 2017

It was an audacious undertaking, even for one of the most storied American companies: With a single machine, IBM would tackle humanity’s most vexing diseases and revolutionize medicine. Breathlessly promoting its signature brand — Watson — IBM sought to capture the world’s imagination, and it quickly zeroed in on a high-profile target: cancer. But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn’t living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer...

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In Military Care, a Pattern of Errors but Not Scrutiny

Sharon LaFraniere and Andrew W. Lehren | New York Times | June 28, 2014

Since 2001, the Defense Department has required military hospitals to conduct safety investigations when patients unexpectedly die or suffer severe injury. The object is to expose and fix systemic errors, often in the most routine procedures, that can have disastrous consequences for the quality of care. Yet there is no evidence of such an inquiry into Mrs. Zeppa’s death.

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It Is Time for Physicians to Fight Back. Now.

Matthew Hahn | Kevin MD | May 14, 2017

The American health care system is broken, but it is not really “health care” that is the problem. The science of medicine, the tests, and the treatments available are better than ever. It is health care bureaucracy that is the problem. But doctors, nurses, and patients bear the brunt of the dysfunction. Medical professionals are unable to practice, and patients are denied the care they need, even though it is readily available. Careers are being ruined, and lives lost along the way. It is time to fight back...

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Kangaroos, Insurance Companies, and the Rising Cost of Healthcare

Complaining about health care prices is nothing new. The medical component of CPI has been higher than the overall CPI for decades. As far back as 1989 Gerry Anderson and colleagues showed "It's the Prices, Stupid" that explained why our national spending was so high compared to other countries. More recently, Elizabeth Rosenthal detailed those prices in an series of reports in The New York Times. She recently followed those up with her incisive book An American Sickness. Dr. Rosenthal also illustrated some of the clever techniques used to wring the most money out of our pockets, such as the upcoding industry and tacking facility fees onto visits. As the saying goes, if you're sitting at a poker table and you can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you.

Killer Care: How Medical Error Became America's Third Largest Cause of Death, And What Can Be Done About It

...The following year, researchers shook the profession with an article in Health Affairs entitled “‘Global Trigger Tool’ Shows that Adverse Events in Hospitals May be Ten Times Greater than Previously Measured.” Dr. David Classen, who did the seminal research for global triggers, served as lead author of the study, which looked at three mid-size to large (ranging from 550 to 1,000 beds) teaching hospitals associated with medical schools in the West and Northwest that participated on the condition of anonymity...When different detection methods were applied, global triggers found over 90 percent of events, the government’s Patient Safety Indicators (based on discharge summaries) found 8.5 percent, and voluntary reporting disclosed only 2 percent (afraid of censure and malpractice, doctors and nurses seldom willingly self-accuse). Classen, et al. warned: “reliance on voluntary reporting and the Patient Safety Indicators could produce misleading conclusions about the current safety of care in the U.S. health-care system and misdirect efforts to improve patient safety.”...

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Let's Hope This Bores You

I think I know what is wrong with health care: not enough people are bored. These are stressful times for health care. There's a never-ending stream of innovation, constant pressures about costs, concerns about the quality of care, conflicting research findings, ongoing uncertainty about how we should finance what coverage for which people, and new business models and organizational structures. There's too much to take in, and everyone in health care is working too hard, too long.  Honestly, who has time to be bored? But that's a problem. We usually think of being bored as a bad thing. You don't often find people saying they're looking to be bored. You don't find many activities that bill themselves as being boring...

Make No Little Plans

Ever seen the new TV show 'Pure Genius'?  Probably not; its ratings are dismal.  I've seen it, and, well, it isn't very good.  But what I like is the premise: a young tech billionaire builds a hospital using only the latest technology, and treats patients regardless of cost. Gotta give the creators props for trying to re-imagine hospitals.  The health care industry could do with some serious attempts at re-imaging, and not just for hospitals. What made me think about this were two stories about the auto industry, which is desperately trying to remain relevant in a world of Uber, self-driving cars, and our love affair with our various digital devices...

Obama Backs 15 of 18 VA Commission Recommendations

Aisha Chowdhry | FCW | September 6, 2016

President Barack Obama is backing 15 of the 18 recommendations made by the Commission on Care to improve service delivery at the Department of Veterans Affairs. However, he is resisting a bid to revise the way the VA's health care system is run. The recommendations are included in the commission's final report...

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ONC Playbook Breaks Down Health IT, EHR Tasks and Buzzwords

Jennifer Bresnick | HealthIT Analytics | September 27, 2016

The healthcare industry seems to be largely driven by buzzwords: quick and snappy phrases that reduce complex, difficult, expensive and often confusing initiatives into keywords that may not mean much to the uninitiated. From big data and population health management to electronic health records and value-based care, these short and sweet terms have come to define the new direction of one of the nation’s largest sectors...

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ONC’s John Fleming Wants Patients to Have a Single Unified Health record

Evan Sweeney | Fierce Healthcare | June 2, 2017

A senior administrator with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT said he wants patients to have a unified health record that could pull data from various medical providers into a single record. John Fleming, the ONC’s deputy assistant secretary for health technology reform, outlined his vision that would give patients more control of their medical information during the International Summit on the Future of Health Privacy hosted by Georgetown University Law...

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Only 12% Of Docs Meet Meaningful Use Rules

David Pittman | MedPage Today | February 20, 2013

Just over 12% of about 509,000 eligible physicians said they met requirements for meaningful use incentives for electronic health records (EHRs), early study results show. Read More »