The guiding coalition at Better Times Hospital has revisited its original proposition, called 3-6-9. The original vision included three medical staff committees (the medical executive committee [MEC], credentials committee, and a single multispecialty peer review committee); six...
The only thing harder than initiating change is sustaining it. It has been six months since Better Times Hospital held its retreat. The task at hand, as noted in John Kotter's Leading Change, is step seven of the eight-step change process: consolidate the gains to date...
The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently conducted a study to examine the effect federal fraud and abuse laws have on hospitals' ability to implement financial incentive programs for physicians. Its findings, although not shocking, are notable: The...
The saying "If you build it, they will come," applies to baseball fields and malls, but not CPOE. Getting these systems up and running involves a host of challenges, including cost and IT infrastructure, but the most formidable of those challenges is getting the docs on board...
Travel back 100 years, and you will find William Osler, the "father of modern medicine," writing about the physician-patient relationship. The topic isn't new, but it has come into the spotlight in recent years thanks to patients' demands for a more personalized approach to...
Good things come from hospitalist programs. Well-run hospitalist programs produce shorter lengths of stay, better core measure compliance, and more rapid adoption of order sets and protocols. Primary care physicians (PCP) experience an increase in productivity and income after turning over...
According to a recent Office of Inspector General (OIG) report, Hospital Incident Reporting Systems Do Not Capture Most Patient Harm (http://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-09-00091.pdf), hospital reporting systems aren’t...
Most of us are familiar with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders. The organization's website states that it is "... committed to bringing quality medical care to people in crisis regardless of their race, religion, or political affiliation."
In an effort to improve the accuracy of the data contained within the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) and the Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank (HIPDB), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has...
A U.S. District Court in Florida granted a motion to dismiss a five-count complaint filed by Mina Zoher, MD, against Naples Community Hospital (NCH) Healthcare Systems, Inc. Zoher applied for a staff position at two hospitals operated by NCH.
