Healthcare Strategic Management articles from October 2005

Healthcare Strategic Management archives from October 2005

Using ROI to count every dollar and make every dollar count.(return on investment)
October 1, 2005... With today's tight operating budgets, rising expenses, and narrow profit margins, tracking spending and keeping an eye on the bottom line are more important than ever. Healthcare executives, marketers, and managers are finding that return on...

Clarian makes big investment in services for the smallest patients.(Clarian Health Partners)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Clarian Health Partners in Indianapolis will spend $500 million over the next 10 years to expand its pediatric services. The plan includes a $200 million, 10-story addition to Clarian's 250-bed Riley Hospital for Children. The addition...

Walter Reed name will live on, but DC operations set to cease.(Walter Reed Army Medical Center )(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, is slated for closure by the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission. But operations of the venerable, 500-bed military hospital will continue at the National Naval Medical Center...

Michigan hospital system adds PPO to bring in national clients.(Trinity Health, preferred provider organization)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Trinity Health in Novi, Ml, is expanding its insurance business by establishing a national preferred provider organization (PPO). Called Care Choices, the PPO is designed for large, self-insured employers and will be eligible to be...

Catholic Healthcare West begins to rebuild after financial losses.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) in San Francisco is growing again after recovering from losses that reached $1 billion in 2001, when a turnaround team was brought in. "We've been working very hard on the turnaround," Charlie Francis, senior...

After long court battles, Detroit system will be allowed to expand.(Henry Ford Health System)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... A legal challenge to expansion plans by Henry Ford Health System in Detroit and St. John Health System in Warren, MI, ended when the Michigan Supreme Court refused to hear a protest by six competing hospitals and the Economic Alliance of...

Hospitals address local needs with ER, cath lab expansions.(emergency room)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Hanford (CA) Community Medical Center, with 59 beds, spent $414,000 to expand its emergency department. The move increased the number of emergency room (ER) beds in the central California region to 15 from eight and provided patients with...

Hospitals in Katrina-affected areas will get break from red tape.(Medicare and Medicaid Services )(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Hospitals treating patients affected by Hurricane Katrina will get a break from some of the red tape associated with government healthcare programs. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said it expects to waive some of the...

Surgeon General gives high marks to hospitals in disaster.(Rich Carmona)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Even if the government was ill-prepared to respond quickly to the hurricane and flooding disasters that struck the Southeast, hospitals were on their toes, Surgeon General Rich Carmona said during a September 6 press briefing. "I think one...

New Web site provides multilingual medical forms.(www.healthinfotranslations.com)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Although an interpreter is an important tool for hospitals that work with non-English speakers, getting documentation in other languages can be an expensive prospect. Three Columbus, OH-based healthcare systems have addressed that problem with...

Study: Public health agencies disappoint when faced with infectious disease alerts.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Public health agencies do not respond well to reports of infectious diseases from hospitals and other providers, according to a report in Health Affairs, an online journal published by the Department of Health and Human Services. Just...

Number of Americans without health insurance rises.
October 1, 2005... More uninsured patients than ever are presenting at the nation's hospitals. The number of people with health insurance increased by 2 million to 245.3 million between 2003 and 2004, and the number without such coverage rose by 800,000 to...

Teaching hospitals experience alarming rate of adverse events in intensive care units.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Even with the leading-edge technology and advanced methods of large teaching hospitals, seriously ill patients are not immune from medical errors. That is the implication of a study published in the August Critical Care Medicine, which...

New Jersey hospitals continue to improve use of best practices.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... A quality improvement study of New Jersey hospitals found that they exceeded the national average in improved care to heart attack and pneumonia patients in 2004. The state issued its second annual hospital performance report card, which...

Acute MI outcomes better with statin drugs on admission, new study confirms.(myocardial infarction)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Patients admitted to hospitals with acute myocardial infarction (MI) have better outcomes if they receive statin drugs within 24 hours of arrival, according to a new study. The study, conducted by specialists at UCLA Medical Center in Los...

CMS listened to hospitals about reimbursement claims, but the answer was not always 'yes'.(Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services)
October 1, 2005... Hospitals will find it easier in 2006 to claim higher payments from Medicare for unusually expensive cases and may seek reimbursement for the use of some new technology under new diagnosis-related groups (DRG). But they will not get...

Competition from specialists, poorer patients among factors that plague hospitals.
October 1, 2005... The rise of specialty hospitals, along with rising poverty rates and declining numbers of Americans who have insurance coverage, portend trouble for general hospitals and the healthcare industry overall, a new report warns. Developments in...

Spyware heats up cookie debate.(computer cookie files )(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Internet users now routinely delete their cookies--bits of data stored on their computers that track information such as how often they visit a Web site or what pages they've viewed. This has sent marketers scrambling for a new tool to measure...

CMS' hospital quality site adds more data.(United States. Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' web site)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) updated its Hospital Compare Web site (www. hospitalcompare.hhs.gov) in early September to include more data about hospitals' performance based on 20 quality measures. The site, which is...

ECRI launches into clearinghouse for device-related disaster relief.(Emergency Care Research Institute)
October 1, 2005... ECRI, a nonprofit health services research agency, in September launched a Web-based clearinghouse for information about medical device-related disaster relief to benefit healthcare facilities affected by Hurricane Katrina. The Katrina Medical...

CEO's guide to winning physician relations.(chief executive officers)
October 1, 2005... Of all the relationships that a hospital's senior leadership must manage, finding successful partnerships with physicians can be the most challenging. It requires the most creativity, risk, and effort, Paula Dewitt writes. During its...

Prevent patient falls through education.
October 1, 2005... Sometimes preventing patient falls requires a hospital to turn over a new leaf. At Syracuse (NY) Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital, Risk Manager Marcia Dawley, RN, and her team instituted a patient-falls awareness and prevention program...

New patient safety law to facilitate sharing of medical error data.(Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005)
October 1, 2005... The consensus among professionals in the healthcare quality field is that the new patient safety law enacted in late July will facilitate the voluntary reporting of medical errors by acute-care hospitals and other health facilities. The...

Tracers, PPR approach give one hospital perfect JCAHO survey.(Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization's periodic performance review, Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center periodic performance review)
October 1, 2005... Intensive mock tracers and a focused periodic performance review (PPR) helped one New Jersey hospital come away from its July survey with no requirements for improvement. Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center in Secaucus credits the PPR and...

JCAHO to lead world effort to fight medical errors.(Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization (JCAHO) will coordinate an international effort to reduce medical errors, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced August 23. The accrediting agency and its affiliate,...

Improve ED flow at triage and registration.(emergency department)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Triage and registration are two areas that can be adjusted to improve flow through emergency department (ED) and thus improve turnaround time and patient satisfaction, according to one patient-flow specialist. Triage is supposed to help...

Understand the top 10 reasons doctors quit jobs.
October 1, 2005... Physicians--especially good ones--have plenty of choices about where they want to practice. To hold onto strong doctors, you must understand what causes them to leave, says Michael P. Broxterman, chief operating officer at the national...

Wound care prices set to rise, survey says.
October 1, 2005... Prices of wound care supplies--from Band-Aids[TM] to tourniquets--are set to rise this year. Advanced products (e.g., vacuum devices, silver coatings, and protein gels) are expensive, and early adopters who use them will see their wound...

A benevolence index for healthcare providers.(WORTH READING)
October 1, 2005... Gaining the trust of consumers is becoming increasingly difficult for healthcare providers. Consumer distrust may stem from the emphasis the media places on medical malpractice cases, while lifesaving and successful outcomes go unreported,...

Walkrounds boost safety and satisfaction.
October 1, 2005... Across the nation, healthcare leaders are hitting the hallways and walking the wards in an effort to improve patient safety. During executive walkrounds, also called leadership or patient safety walkrounds, hospital executives and senior...