Christiana Care Health System, one of the largest healthcare providers in the mid-Atlantic, has achieved wide-ranging improvements in both clinical performance and business outcomes after implementing strategies designed to ensure top-quality care delivery while at the same time containing costs.

... read more

Heart hospital across the country are preparing for the new mandatory bundled-payment program for cardiac care. Set to begin this July, the program makes hospitals in certain markets accountable for the quality and cost of care for bypass and heart attack patients until 90 days after discharge.

... read more

LUMEDX is happy to welcome to our family three new clients: Marshall Medical Centers; Holyoke Medical Center; and Baylor Scott & White Health, the largest not-for-profit healthcare organization in Texas.

... read more

How would you like to have to tell 34,000 patients that their data had been hacked? That’s the situation that Quest Diagnostics found itself in recently after hackers stole health information including names, birth dates, telephone numbers and lab results.

... read more

As the dust settles after the presidential election, it appears that Donald Trump is already softening some of his positions, especially his position on Obamacare. Media outlets have speculated that President Obama pushed hard for the continuance of his signature healthcare program when he met with Trump at the White House following the election.

... read more

Patient safety is once again in the news with the recent release of the Leapfrog Group's Fall 2016 Hospital Safety Grade List. Almost all the hospitals on the list received a passing grade. Of the 2,633 hospitals evaluated, 844 earned an "A," 658 earned a "B," 954 earned a "C," 157 earned a "D" and 20 earned an "F."

... read more

Last weekend was a busy one for those trying to parse the new MACRA rule released on Friday. At 2,202 pages, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act rule wasn't exactly beach reading, and it gave the health IT community plenty to talk about on social media and in policy statements.

The dust is still settling, but it appears that early reaction to the rule was mostly positive. Healthcare organizations praised the CMS for being responsive to concerns they had raised during the comment period leading up to the rule's finalization. In fact, about 80 percent of the 2,000+ pages are comments CMS received and its responses.
... read more

The number of clinicians who use smartphones and other mobile devices on the job is rising rapidly, and so is the number of facilities that have created mobile device management strategies to cope. "Organizations with a documented mobility strategy have nearly doubled, and in-house use of pagers has increased slightly during the past two years," according to Health Data Management. Almost 90 percent of physicians surveyed reported using smartphones, while about half of nurses and other staff members use them. In response, more than 60 percent of hospitals surveyed have a documented mobile device strategy. (The survey, by mobile messaging service vendor Spok, included responses from about 550 hospitals.) The leading mobile devices used in hospitals are: Smartphones (78 percent) In-house pagers (71 percent) Wi-Fi phones (69 percent) Wide-area pagers (57 percent) Tablets (52 percent) Security and privacy, of course, are huge concerns for those setting mobile... read more

GAO Recommends Corrective Action by Department of Health and Human Services More than 113 million electronic health records were breached in 2015, a year that saw a total of 56 cybersecurity attacks in healthcare alone. That's a 13-fold increase from 2006 to 2015. The Government Accountability Office isn't going to let those cybersecurity failures go unremarked upon. The GAO last week came down hard on the Department of Health and Human Services, pointing out a number of weaknesses in efforts by HHS to help health plans and other providers protect data. "HHS has established an oversight program for compliance with privacy and security regulations, but its actions did not always fully verify that the regulations were implemented," wrote the GAO in a report released Sept. 26. The report also called out HHS for giving technical assistance "that was not pertinent to identified problems" in cybersecurity, and for failing to follow up on cases it investigated. In short, the GAO... read more

New research shows that patients in need of a hospital transfer were treated 27 minutes faster when their medical teams used a smartphone app-based social network system (SNS) to set up the transfer, compared to medical teams who didn’t use the smartphone technology. The research, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, monitored the time that patients with ST-elevated myocardial infarction (STEMI) suffered from ischemia (reduction in blood supply) while they waited to have a procedure opening their blocked arteries. On nights and weekends, the treatment time reduction was even greater than during the regular work week. One of the study’s senior researchers, Jin Joo Park, M.D., pointed out that there is a higher risk of death for patients who get to a hospital during off hours—a worldwide trend. “Transferred STEMI patients rarely achieve timely reperfusion due to delays in the transfer process, especially when transferred during off-hours,” Park told... read more