Fifty percent of healthcare providers in rural Colorado and Kansas believe that palliative care at the end of life could be improved at their facility, according to the results of a survey published in the Journal of Rural Health. Differences in perceptions of palliative care among clinicians,...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 28
The task of creating physician feedback reports has been a challenge for years. There are no official guidelines on what type of data to include or how organizations should collect and calculate those data. And although some medical societies publish benchmarking data for certain procedures,...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 27
A study of quality process measures for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) found that their application accounted for only 6% of hospital-level variation in risk-standardized, 30-day mortality rates for patients with AMI. The study, published in the July 5 issue of the Journal of the American...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 27
A physician peer reviewer with a potential conflict of interest is ethically obligated to disclose it to the rest of the peer review committee. The committee will then determine whether the conflict is susbstantial enough that the peer reviewer in question should not be involved in their...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 26
Americans made more than 1.1 billion visits annually to physician offices and hospital emergency and outpatient departments in 2004, up by 31% since 1994, according to the latest data released by The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on June 23, in its annual national hospital ambulatory medical...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 26
Flagging individual charts for physician review is just the beginning of the interpretation process; the real interpretation occurs when the physician reviewer looks at the chart. Common concerns are that chart review is subjective and that there is little consistency or inter-rater reliability...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 25
Since there is currently no standard performance feedback report from which to work, many healthcare organizations find themselves wondering exactly what types of information to include. Although each organization must decide for itself what physician data it will continually monitor, all...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 25
The nation's emergency medical system as a whole is overburdened, underfunded, highly fragmented, and ill-prepared to handle surges from disasters, according to a series of reports released June 14 by the Institute of Medicine (IoM). The IoM's recommendations for resolving these problems include...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 24
A new study from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) has found that community-based preparation for and response to disasters will require more effective communication and planning among hospitals, public health agencies, and community first responders than...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 24
A person who believes it is important to consider the interests and concerns of other stakeholders in a situation is said to act ethically. A person who acts only in his or her own interest, even when others are harmed, is said to act unethically. In what they say and do, all leaders consciously...
