Hospital Compare, a CMS website, provides "star-ratings" to hospitals based on performance. It's dropping the safety measures from the star-rating scoring, but it's maintaining the information in another database. Does removing safety measures make the ratings less useful? The answer is, as is often the case, complicated.
patient safety
A recent Pennsylvania Supreme court ruling, recognizing what it means to be a doctor, is not a solution but a problem. Authors in The New England Journal of Medicine beg to differ.
With a constant surge of competing profit centers fragmenting healthcare, more layers than ever are conspiring to erode the doctor-patient relationship. Here is a guide to being your own advocate. It will help reduce your anxiety, eliminate unnecessary suffering and improve outcome and recovery.
Shaming and blaming isn't part of improving patient safety or resolving the opioid crisis. Healthcare workers and Congress frequently blame others and rarely take personal responsibility, and that's not a culture that fosters reflection and meaningful improvement.
Anthem's new policies contribute to the detriment of patient safety. The insurers "cost-saving" measures create more problems than solutions, while generating questionable financial benefits.
A media dustup involving statements made by a former medical director for Aetna has led to multi-state investigations into the practices of the insurance carrier. But for a doctor, is such a job even ethical in the first place?
Meaningful use reform (in the funding bill just signed by the President) is vital toward curtailing the onerous nature of Electronic Health Records' implementation. When satisfying government IT requirements becomes more important than the needs of a patient getting cancer surgery or a doctor’s providing that care, we are really missing the point.
We all tend to do certain things because “it’s just what you do,” or it's out of passive acceptance of conventional wisdom. And especially in the medical realm, it's important not to overlook issues that could be of even greater importance.
In an effort to combat patient non-compliance with medications, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first pill with an ingestible tracking sensor. Will it be used for good or evil, or something in between?
A recent report generated out of London by the National Health Service (NHS) paints a grim picture about systemic failings in healthcare of the sickest patients. It is not rocket science as to the "why," in fact the reason is rather simple.