Trustee Staff

Articles

Quality & Patient Safety

Charleston Area Medical Center Creates Culture of Quality in Winning Baldrige Award

By Trustee Staff

This year’s winner of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the health care category, Charleston (W.Va.) Area Medical Center Health System is the largest nongovernmental employer in its region, and is an important regional provider of Level I trauma care, neonatal and pediatric intensive care, kidney transplants and a host of other services

Delivery System Transformation, Governance Effectiveness, Strategic Planning, Leadership

Furthering Population Health Demands Diverse Governance

By Trustee Staff

A board that guides the strategic direction of a health care system must have a keen sense of its business environment — the blend of market forces, financial realities and significant influences affecting every move the board makes. In the past, there had to be financial, legal and clinical acumen to guide decisions. That's not enough today, as providers reorient priorities toward population-level health.

Care Delivery

NOVA Awards Recognize Community Health Improvement

By Trustee Staff

Each year, the American Hospital Association honors hospital-led programs that improve community health with the AHA NOVA Award. Winners are recognized for looking beyond patients’ physical ailments, rooting out economic or social barriers to care, and collaborating with other community organizations.

Leveraging Technology

Hospitals Lag in Cybersecurity Exercises

By Trustee Staff

In comparison, 79 percent of hospitals named to the 2015 Health Care’s Most Wired list — those organizations that report achieving certain benchmarks in an annual information technology survey — hold those exercises annually. But when it comes to risk analyses to identify compliance gaps and vulnerabilities, the difference between all hospital survey respondents and those named Most Wired is less stark: 35 percent of all hospitals and 42 percent of Most Wired hospitals perform risk analyses every six months.

Physician Workforce, Strategic Planning, Issues & Trends, Workforce

Demand for Psychiatrists Skyrockets in Past Year

By Trustee Staff

Primary care physicians, followed by psychiatrists, topped a list of 20 most in-demand medical specialists, according to a report from physician search firm Merritt Hawkins. The firm tracked its physician and advanced practitioner recruiting assignments and found that it was retained to conduct more searches for psychiatrists in the past year than in any other period in its 27-year history.

Delivery System Transformation, Physician Workforce, Quality & Patient Safety, Strategic Planning, Workforce

Primary Care Docs Say Metrics Hurt Patient Care

By Trustee Staff

Half of the nation’s primary care physicians say the increased use of quality-of-care metrics to assess provider performance is having a negative impact on patient care, according to a survey report from The Commonwealth Fund and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Twenty-two percent see quality metrics as having a positive impact on quality.

Similarly, 52 percent say that programs that impose financial penalties for unnecessary admissions or readmissions are having a negative effect on quality. Just 12 percent say such programs are having a positive effect.

Care Delivery, Quality & Patient Safety

JAMA Study: Costs and Inpatient Stays Decline for Medicare Beneficiaries

By Trustee Staff

Mortality and hospitalization rates and inpatient spending for Medicare patients 65 and older declined between 1999 and 2013. A Journal of the American Medical Association study found that the annual death rate from all causes declined to 4.5 percent from 5.3 percent, and the number of hospitalizations in the last six months of life dropped to 103 from 131 per 100 deaths. Inpatient spending per fee-for-service beneficiary declined to $2,801 from $3,290.