Reducing patient suffering — the kind caused not by disease but by medical care itself — has become a medical goal. The effort is driven partly by competition and partly by a realization that suffering, whether from long waits, inadequate explanations or feeling lost in the shuffle, is a real and pressing issue. It is […]
GREEN BAY – As a cost-conscious consumer, you wouldn’t pay $3 a gallon for gas if across town you could buy it for $2.50. But whether you realize it or not that’s what you’re doing with health care. FOX11 Investigates found hospitalization cost figures, provided by Green Bay’s four hospitals, show a wide range of […]
Article in Today’s Hospitalist written by David A. Frenz, MD, a hospitalist for HealthEast Care System in St. Paul, Minn., and is board certified in both family and addiction medicine. AMERICANS—both individually and as a nation— spend a boatload on health care. A study in the January 2013 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine pegged annual health […]
In Innovation and Best Practices in Health Care Scheduling, CEOs with experience leading change in five of the nation’s prominent health systems-Denver Health, Geisinger Health System, Kaiser Permanente, ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value, and Seattle Children’s Hospital-describe how they tackled the complex issues surrounding wait times throughout the continuum of care. They review the important forces […]
The Health Care Cost Institute published a new data brief that examines trends in out-of-pocket spending at a national and state level, and looks at average differences in consumer prices for a set of five common medical procedures nationally and in nine states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin. With […]
HHS has set a goal of tying 30 percent of traditional, or fee-for-service, Medicare payments to quality or value through alternative payment models, such as Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) or bundled payment arrangements by the end of 2016, and tying 50 percent of payments to these models by the end of 2018. HHS also set […]
We are looking for Wisconsin healthcare leaders to participate in an innovative project to develop and submit a State Health System Innovation Plan. Click image to read about this important project!
Once again, Consumer Reports is evaluating customer satisfaction and hospital performance, this time in California. Among the survey questions were: Did the doctor listen carefully and spend enough time with the patient? Were test results provided? Were receptionists as courteous and helpful as they should be? And was the patient able to see the doctor within […]
While reporting on the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, journalist Steven Brill was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition that required heart surgery. “There I was: a reporter who had made hospital presidents and hospital executives and health care executives and insurance executives sweat because I asked them all kinds of questions about their salaries […]
In a recent article by Patricia Moody, she highlights how Seattle Children’s Hospital used “classic supply management, Japanese shop floor methods and 4P to save money, free up clinicians for more bedside care and build its new, smaller facility. That’s right, they got better and smaller!” Read the full article here.
