Over the past several years, healthcare quality has come under increased scrutiny. In 2001, the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) report Crossing the Quality Chasm highlighted the lack of consistency in the quality of care in the American healthcare system. The IOM report showed...
Authority suggests being dictated to. Leadership suggests collaboration. It's been said that physicians will adapt to changes in practice if they get data proving it's the best move for the patient. Banner Health, a 14-hospital system based in Phoenix, is testing that assumption...
Physicians are constantly bombarded with information, and it can be difficult to decide which correspondence to respond to first. You may forget about important e-mails that get buried deep in your inbox, and although you have every intention of responding to voice mails, it's...
The Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986 (HCQIA) was created to provide immunity from monetary damages to hospitals and individual practitioners participating on medical peer review committees. HCQIA also created the National Practitioner Data Bank.
Many clients have asked me about appropriate privileging for telemedicine providers. This is a regulatory issue, and the most common regulatory agencies, The Joint Commission and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), have not been in sync with their requirements....
The Joint Commission released a new FAQ on medical staff standard MS.01.01.01 on March 10, 2011. The FAQ clarified that the medical staff is not required to hold general medical staff meetings, even though meetings were required up until 2004. In that same 2004 revision, The Joint Commission...
Orienting hospitalists involves more than just providing new hires with a badge, showing them where the ED is, and sending them on their merry way. As employees of the hospital,...
Although hospitalists are well aware of their programs’ resource utilization and case management goals, they may lose sight of those goals during the course of their busy days. They may feel like they need an extra set of arms and legs and a...
Hospitalists have long been touted as the drivers of quality improvement initiatives, and one of their key tools for tracking the effectiveness of their initiatives is a dashboard. Dashboards are short reports containing data, often depicted in graphs, charts, and tables, that summarize the...