Health Care Headlines

As the care delivery models of hospitals and health systems evolve, healthcare executives and materials and practice area managers predict a major shift in admissions from inpatient to outpatient settings.

Hospitalists Should Not Hesitate to Join Hospital Committees
What’s the story with hospital committee work? Is this part of my job?

Three California measures that would expand the roles of non-physicians working in primary care easily passed their first committee test today.

In an effort to meet the pending standards of the Affordable Care Act, Long Beach-area hospitals are collaborating on a push to reduce patient readmissions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a launched a vigorous effort to curb infections from carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) infections. The new initiative, called “Detect and Protect,” recommends lab tests to alert clinical staff when CRE has been detected and offers facility-level prevention strategies to curb the spread of the highly antibiotic-resistant germs.

HHS on Wednesday released enhanced standards to help health and healthcare organizations promote health equity, advance quality and remove disparities in healthcare.

How many nurses does it take to run a hospital?  Legislatures in at least seven states and the District of Columbia are trying to answer that question as they debate bills that would require hospitals to have a minimum number of nurses on staff at all times.

Over the past decade, patient-centered care has become a mantra for high-quality health care.

The AHA today released its annual advocacy agenda outlining the association’s key advocacy priorities for 2013. The agenda, which members will use to explain the hospital field’s concerns to their legislators, will be highlighted at the AHA Annual Membership Meeting April 28 to May 1 in Washington, D.C.

A group of emergency physicians recently launched a website offering free tools designed to standardize the patient handoff process to reduce the risk of harmful communication miscues.

Hospitals and health systems need metrics to determine their progress in moving toward a pay-for-performance model, according to a report by the American Hospital Association’s Health Research & Educational Trust and Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence.

Getting staff nurses involved in nursing research is not easy. Along with the additional time and work required to complete a project, it’s difficult to find mentors who have the extra hours to guide nurses through the process.

Nearly 400 California hospitals have partnered in support of a public-private partnership aimed at enhancing the quality of care provided to patients. The Allied for Patient Safety partners include the California Hospital Association, the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California, the Hospital Association of Southern California, the Hospital Association of San Diego and Imperial Counties and the California Hospital Patient Safety Organization.

They want to take care of you.
Doctors, nurses and a variety of specialized health professionals are duking it out in California’s Capitol over who should get your business once federal law requires that everyone have health insurance.

Providence Holy Cross Medical Center has received a $7 million donation, its largest financial gift, from the estate of the late Julian and Gladys Saunders, longtime San Fernando Valley residents, officials said Wednesday.

Years ago, doctors would make rounds to supervise care for dozens of hospitalized patients. Now physicians often want to orchestrate care from their office, so they’ll make fewer trips to the hospital—or none at all. Many especially don’t want to be called at 3 a.m. to report to the hospital for one of their patients, or even get involved in certain procedures beyond their specialties.

In an interview appearing in the April issue of H&HN, AHA Chairman Benjamin Chu, M.D., advises budget-makers in Washington to avoid whacking providers with another round of dramatic payment cuts (you can read the interview here and watch an excerpt of it here).

We are fortunate in our country to have the best medical technology in the world. Unfortunately, delivery of this technology, reflected in a worldwide healthcare ranking of 37th, is a disservice to the American people and must be rectified especially when Cuba is ranked 39th.

California may have high housing, fuel and electric power prices, but Californians’ spending on health care is below the national average, according to a new data compilation by the Wall Street Journal.

Increased emphasis on improving quality and patient safety in hospitals, growing pressures to reduce costs, and new limits on residency work hours have all led to an explosion in the number of physicians who work solely in hospitals.

The California Hospital Association (CHA) remains strongly opposed to Assembly Bill (AB) 975, which is scheduled for consideration on Tuesday April 2, 2013 by the state Assembly Health Committee. AB 975 replaces local control with a “guilty until proven innocent” burden on well-managed hospitals and impacts the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Much has been said about the challenges of healthcare reform legislation. With healthcare reform, more and more academic medical centers will enter into strategic partnerships with community-based hospitals in an effort to create a comprehensive system of care that will benefit local residents.

If AB 975 is intended to improve access to quality health care in California’s communities, it actually does just the opposite.  California’s not-for-profit community hospitals provide many community benefits that go far beyond the strict and unrealistic definition of charity care that is proposed in AB 975.

The journey for the Bill Holmes Tower began in 2005. Throughout its 50-year history, CHOC Children’s Hospital (Orange, Calif.) had relied on a partnership with adjacent St. Joseph’s Hospital for access to surgical, laboratory, imaging, and emergency services for its patients. The hospital wanted to improve the family experience by broadening its care and bringing comprehensive treatment under its own roof.

Medicare payments to physicians for services performed beginning Monday, April 1, will shrink by 2% under the automatic, across-the-board budget cuts called sequestration.

CHA has prepared the attached first-glance summary of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), implementing California’s Coordinated Care Initiative, now referred to as Cal MediConnect.

For the first time, private paramedics were deployed last week in Orange County to transfer patients between health facilities, a move that instantly generated ideological controversy and questions about quality.

California health officials announced Wednesday that the state has won federal approval for a pilot program designed to improve health care quality and coordination for those enrolled in both Medicare and Medi-Cal.

One of the region’s most anticipated health care emergency drills was staged on the old campus of the LAC + USC Medical Center on March 19. Presented by HASC’s Security and Safety Committee and with more than 230 security, clinical, administrative and law enforcement staff attending, the standing-room only event was designed to simulate an active shooter incident and ensure that those in attendance leave with some tools to create a response plan for their organization.

The U.S. News & World Report will launch the Hospital of Tomorrow conference, focusing on critical challenges facing the future of the hospital industry, which will be held Nov. 4-6 in Washington, D.C.

In healthcare, the IT group is in a pivotal position to enable its organization’s response to reform and other industry changes by putting in place an infrastructure that can guide administrative and clinical leaders alike to deliver better outcomes at reduced cost.

Hospital stays can be scary, but they don’t have to be.
A stay in the hospital can be stressful, whether it’s an emergency visit, a birth of a child or a planned surgery. But there are a number of things patients and their relatives or friends can do in order to make stays in the hospital more comfortable.

Faced with severe overcrowding and emergency room wait times that average 12 hours, Los Angeles County officials are considering adding 150 more beds to County/USC Medical Center.

Joint Commission Resources, in the lead article of the March 2013 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, offers “Applying Lean Methods to Improve Quality and Safety in Surgical Sterile Instrument Processing,” C. Craig Blackmore, MD, MPH, and his co-authors at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, Wash. describe how their hospital reduced the occurrence of surgical instrument processing errors from 3 percent of their total surgical cases to 1.5 percent during a 37-month period.

Some Orange County hospital administrators worry that a new medical device sales tax could saddle them with higher prices for the equipment they depend on just as they are bracing for lower payments from Medicare under the Affordable Care Act.

The use of telehealth remote monitoring interventions was not shown to boost patients’ mental and physical quality of life in a study published in the British Medical Journal, but there were no negative side effects to the treatment either.

This All Facilities Letter (AFL) serves to notify general acute care hospitals (GACHs) of revised California Department of Public Health (CDPH) procedures for accepting hospital healthcare personnel (HCP) influenza vaccination rate reporting data as required under HSC Section 1288.7 and 1288.8.

Doctors serving Medicare patients. Scientists looking for a better way to treat diabetes. HIV patients who can’t afford to buy their medications. These are but some of the many people who will be affected by the automatic federal spending cuts that officially took effect Friday. 

St. Joseph Health and Hoag Hospital have formalized a partnership to streamline health care in Orange County with the creation of Covenant Health Network, hospital officials announced Thursday.

Substitute “physician assistant” or “pharmacist” for the phrase “the doctor will see you now.” This may become a commonplace introduction patients seeking medical care will hear in the future.

With the swing of the federal budget sequester ax just hours away, some scientists in California are concerned for the future of their federally-funded medical research projects. 

Hospitals will see lower insurer payments for services in coming years as Medicare slashes slashes $300 billion from hospital reimbursement and commercial insurers respond to public pressure to curb premium growth, Moody’s says.

In a unanimous, decision the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed hospitals’ and health systems’ hopes of recouping millions in Medicare underpayments made between 1987 and 1994.

Certain health care providers in California are preparing for a long legal struggle over a proposed 10% cut to Medi-Cal reimbursements, Modern Physician reports.

Visit SDIndyACO.com, and you’re greeted by a Hawaiian shirt hanging in an otherwise empty closet. “Future home of something quite cool,” the page’s headline reads.

The 2013 CAHHS California Hospital Volunteer Leadership Conference, Feb. 25-28 in Newport Beach, will offer more than 25 educational workshops on building  successful hospital volunteer programs. 

Doctors and health care providers have formed 106 new Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) in Medicare, ensuring as many as 4 million Medicare beneficiaries now have access to high-quality, coordinated care across the United States, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced.

The inaugural Patient Safety Science & Technology Summit made history when for the first time nine leading medical device companies publicly pledged to make their devices interoperable. The groundbreaking pledges will make patient data collected and displayed on their devices accessible for patients and clinicians – launching a movement designed to reverse the rising tide of preventable patient deaths at U.S. hospitals.

The state budget proposed by Gov. Brown counts on $488.4 million in savings from rate reductions to Medi-Cal providers in keeping with a law passed in 2011 that hasn’t yet been implemented because it’s been held up in court.

California public health officials are bracing for an increase in new flu patients in the coming weeks as the influenza outbreak that has engulfed 47 other states gears up here.

It’s a problem well documented by the nursing industry. About 43% of newly licensed RNs still do not have jobs within 18 months after graduation, according to a survey conducted by the American Society of Registered Nurses.

Due to the recent increase in influenza patients, hospitals should review requirements for tent use. According to a new State Fire Marshal (SMF) policy, tents with labels do not have to be annually recertified. Other current requirements are detailed in the attached California Department of Public Health (CDPH) guidance.

How can hospitals and clinics deliver care that is patient and family centered? As an emergency physician, I’ve often pondered this question after my mother died of an untreated systemic infection in an out-of-state hospital. The experience, which I write about in the January 1 edition of the Washington Post as well as the December issue of Health Affairs, 

Healthcare organizations have large amounts of data but often do not have the tools to bring the data together for useful business information and planning. Healthcare analytics is the systematic use of data and related business insights developed through applied analytical disciplines such as, statistical, contextual, quantitative, predictive, cognitive, other including emerging model to drive fact-based decision making for planning, management, measurement and learning. Analytics may be descriptive, predictive or prescriptive.

Providence Tarzana Medical Center and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles began the New Year with a new partnership that will enhance the level of pediatric care in the San Fernando Valley and surrounding communities.

Orange County authorities shelved a proposal last month aimed at expanding the use of paramedics, and in doing so, preserved a longtime wall in the local health care industry.

Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center is inviting members of the public to attend a talk on what patients and their family members can do to ensure safety while hospitalized.

An increase in emergency room visits for respiratory illnesses caused the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health today to urge residents to get vaccinated.

Flawed analysis and methodology, and the failure to understand that hospitalized patients require costlier care than in the past permeate the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission’s December recommendations for reducing inpatient and outpatient payment rates for FY 2014, which starts this October.

At a mid-November conference in Sacramento on implementation of the federal health care overhaul in 2014, California Health and Human Services Secretary Diana Dooley outlined the political aspects of the task ahead.

For a third year in a row, U.S. healthcare spending in 2011 grew at its lowest rate in the 52 years that federal officials have tracked the figure, according to annual statistics from CMS’ Office of the Actuary.

In a move expected to shake up health care labor battles statewide, the powerful California Nurses Association announced Thursday that it will affiliate with the National Union of Healthcare Workers in fights with major health systems over wages, benefits and patient care issues.

Healthcare added nearly 45,000 jobs in December, more than twice the number added the previous month, and accounted for more than a quarter of the increase in overall nonfarm employment, according to preliminary seasonally adjusted data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Loma Linda University Health will build a major new medical clinic in downtown San Bernardino to provide health care to the needy, train medical residents and teach health-related job skills to high school graduates not planning to attend college.

Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conditionally approved California’s subsidized health care exchange — recently named Covered California — which is preparing to sign up subscribers in October. 

Pediatric units in hospitals across Los Angeles are beginning to see an increase in respiratory syncytial virus or RSV among young children, which can become a serious infection of the lungs in infants.

It’s no longer enough for hospitals to just send a bill to Medicare and get paid.The nation’s biggest insurer is starting to dole out bonuses and penalties to nearly 3,000 hospitals as it ties almost $1 billion in payments to the quality of care provided to patients.

Local hiring is picking up as Covered California — the new name for the state health benefit exchange — charges ahead with plans for a new insurance marketplace in 2014.

As President Obama and Congress try to thrash out a budget deal, the question is not whether they will squeeze money out of Medicare, but how much and who will bear the brunt of the cuts.

The Affordable Care Act strengthened Medicare in important ways. Signed in 2010, the federal health law already has provided free preventive health benefits to millions of people with Medicare, and saved billions of dollars for those who hit the gap in their Part D prescription drug coverage.

Fears that patients are being forced out of hospitals dangerously early may be unfounded, researchers report.

The California Department of Health Care Services is launching a new Medi-Cal email news service in December 2012.  Subscribers can sign up to receive monthly digest bulletins and/or as-it-happens “news flashes” for critical or time-sensitive issues. You can tailor your subscription to receive only information on subject matters of interest to you and your practice including: billing, payment and policy rule changes.

A patient classification system that was installed in 2008 to better measure the severity of illnesses and payment accuracy for Medicare beneficiaries shows that hospitals are successfully contending with a more complex and costlier caseload, the American Hospital Association reports. 

Not-for-profit hospitals and health systems will find it increasingly difficult to cut expenses and hold onto stable profits after 2013, a group of financial analysts concludes.

The federal Affordable Care Act, beginning in 2014, makes tens of millions of Americans eligible for health insurance who suffer without it.

The California Hospital Patient Safety Organization (CHPSO) has launched a new website that supports accelerating safety improvements and eliminating preventable harm. 

Hospital groups and other providers this week intensified their campaigns to protect Medicare and Medicaid from drastic funding cuts that could be considered in the weeks ahead under the so-called fiscal cliff negotiations.

More than three-quarters of U.S. medical students continue to shun primary care for higher-paying specialties, setting the stage for a shortage of doctors as the population ages and health care expands, a study found.

Healthcare leaders are inundated with pleas and demands from payers, the government, their boards, and even their patients to be more accountable to them in cost, quality, and patient safety. Frontline staffers are the focus of the day-to-day evaluation, but senior leaders are charged with developing strategies that will help the organization adapt to new roles. Senior leaders have no playbook from which to evaluate how well they and their most senior deputies are doing, but some innovative senior leaders are keeping it simple.

The rate of flu vaccinations among hospital workers in November increased to 83.4% from 77.8% a year earlier, although the numbers were static for the overall healthcare workforce and the general public, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Three rural, stand-alone hospitals in the Inland Empire are in various stages of addressing daunting financial challenges.

They’ve danced in Laundromats and jails, in rivers and on escalators.  More than 100 locations around Los Angeles have been put to use by Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre.  And now the company can add one more to the list: Barlow Respiratory Hospital.

Paul Davis, the chief of a rural ambulance squad in southern Ohio, was down to his last vial of morphine earlier this fall when a woman with a broken leg needed a ride to the hospital.

More than two years after the groundbreaking for March LifeCare medical campus, there are still no patients and, for that matter, no buildings for them to visit at the former March Air Force Base property near Riverside.

For patients with serious penetrating trauma injuries, emergency medical transport teams should “scoop and go” rather than “stay and stabilize” the patient because staying at the scene for 20 minutes or more increases the patient’s chance of in-hospital death.

The American Hospital Association’s Center for Healthcare Governance released a report highlighting best practices for safety-net hospital’s governance structures. The report’s primary focus is on hospitals that are, or once were, governmental entities.
 

The latest AHA Trendwatch report takes a look at the gains hospitals have made in improving quality and patient safety, including reductions in healthcare-associated infections and adherence to accepted treatment protocols. 

New grads struggling to find jobs. A push to move healthcare from the hospital setting to the community. Networks of providers managing patient care.  For many nurses, today’s workforce situation seems all too familiar

Hospitals in Southern California are collaborating on disaster preparedness plans, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reports.

We have all heard the alarms about the mental health challenges
facing veterans of our most recent wars. Headlines
have been awash in warnings about suicide, substance
abuse, military sexual trauma, depression, PTSD, anxiety,
and other mental health conditions. Simply put, the
idea that veterans have significant mental health needs has
reached the point where the response is often, “Well, of
course – they’ve been to war.”

They come to see Roman Samiley with complaints of headaches, an old bullet wound that still burns, or phantom limb pain of an arm or leg long lost on the battlefield.

In response to President Obama’s re-election and continued implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the California Hospital Association plans to form a coalition with hospital groups from other states to lobby Congress and HHS to reform Medicaid reimbursements, Payers & Providers reports (Payers & Providers, 11/8).

President Obama’s victory eliminated the last serious threat to the existence of his health-care law, but it didn’t remove an array of challenges that will ultimately determine whether the 2010 statute is a policy triumph or a disappointing muddle.

A comprehensive unit-based safety program reduced central line–associated bloodstream infections by 40% in 1,100 intensive care units between 2008 and 2012. Some of the ICUs have remained free of these infections for more than two years—a statistic once thought unattainable by many clinicians.