- Clinical
Calculating the Cost of Length of Stay
Rather than any early knockout in one of his epic matches, eulogies last month for boxing legend Muhammad Ali memorialized his three-decade, very public fight against Parkinson’s disease. The once fleet-footed heavyweight champion’s chronic con...
- Clinical
3 Ways to Reduce Medication Waste in Your Hospital
One of the areas of greatest concern for pharmacy practice, in terms of both cost and impact on patient care, is the increasing development of pharmaceuticals that could be classified as “specialty.” While there is no universally accepted defin...
- Clinical
Value-based Purchasing: Are Your Improvement Strategies Evolving with the Program?
Acting Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Andy Slavitt said earlier this year that CMS often can be viewed as a “black box with opaque regulations and limited back and forth about our policy reasoning or our implementati...
- Clinical
Use Mock Accreditation Surveys to Address Common Problem Areas
One of the areas of greatest concern for pharmacy practice, in terms of both cost and impact on patient care, is the increasing development of pharmaceuticals that could be classified as “specialty.” While there is no universally accepted defin...
- Clinical
If Exam Rooms Had Wings: Lessons from the Airlines
Rather than any early knockout in one of his epic matches, eulogies last month for boxing legend Muhammad Ali memorialized his three-decade, very public fight against Parkinson’s disease. The once fleet-footed heavyweight champion’s chronic con...
- Clinical
Proposed Inpatient Reimbursement Rates Continue Pressure on Hospitals
While attending the National Nuclear Security Administration 2016 Mo-99 conference in St. Louis last week, I learned of a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) citing the 50% likelihood of a shortage of molybdenum-...
- Clinical
Winston Churchill and the 80/20 Rule
Rather than any early knockout in one of his epic matches, eulogies last month for boxing legend Muhammad Ali memorialized his three-decade, very public fight against Parkinson’s disease. The once fleet-footed heavyweight champion’s chronic con...
- Clinical
Health Care Strategy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Rather than any early knockout in one of his epic matches, eulogies last month for boxing legend Muhammad Ali memorialized his three-decade, very public fight against Parkinson’s disease. The once fleet-footed heavyweight champion’s chronic con...
- Clinical
Chronic Care Strategy: A Cure for What Ails Us?
Rather than any early knockout in one of his epic matches, eulogies last month for boxing legend Muhammad Ali memorialized his three-decade, very public fight against Parkinson’s disease. The once fleet-footed heavyweight champion’s chronic con...
- Clinical
If Sherlock Holmes Investigated Health Care Spending
In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s intrepid sleuth observes that “the world is full of obvious things which nobody by chance ever observes.” Many of us who have spent our professional lives in health care have an i...
- Clinical
Goodbye Fee-for-Service. Hello Cardiac Bundles.
Spurred on by the overwhelming participation rates in the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Initiative (BPCI) as well as their uncontested ability to impose a mandate on hospitals in selected areas through the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement p...
- Clinical
A Walk through the Orchard: The Move to Outpatient Surgery
A recent article in Modern Healthcare reported on the enthusiasm over outpatient joint replacement surgery for younger and healthier patients. The arguments in favor of the shift for a subset of carefully selected patients are compelling. Quicker recoverie...
- Clinical
Finding the Signal amid the Noise of Various CMS Payment Models
It is no secret that CMS intends to keep pushing the health care industry toward value-based reimbursement through its evolving payment models. The proposed rule for the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) offers a new method of paying cli...
- Clinical
The Hurricane That Never Came
In 1989, the National Weather Service retired its coastal warning display system in favor of electronic communication and other technological advances. For more than 100 years prior, colored pennants, flags and lights were used to warn mariners of impendin...
- Clinical
A Systematic Approach to Caring for the Chronically Ill
Health care spending in the U.S. exceeds $3 trillion per year and 10% of the population – the chronically ill – accounts for approximately 60% of that cost. Those patients are distinguished by their complex medical conditions that often require...
- Clinical
Take a Team Approach to Managing Incoming Regulations
An alphabet soup of regulations, guidelines and standards, all competing for resources, some financial and almost all involving human capital to implement and execute, are coming at clinicians and hospital administrators faster than the F-18s that fly over...