Quality | April 2018

In a presentation at the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) Congress, Joint Commission president and CEO Mark Chassin, MD, MPP, MPH, made the case that creating a high-reliability organization with zero incidents of patient harm shouldn’t be seen as an abstract, aspirational goal.

The hype around blockchain had reached new heights at HIMSS18 in Las Vegas, much of it centered on how an immutable, decentralized ledger of transactions and exchanges could be used to solve issues around interoperability and data sharing. Jason Goldwater, MA, MPA, senior director of the CedarBridge Group suggested it could streamline another headache for healthcare professionals: quality reporting.

At the April meeting of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), the panel voted to recommend a 30 percent cut to payment rates for standalone emergency departments (EDs) and indicated it may suggest action on hospital quality reporting later this year.

In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found 221 instances of “unusual resistance germs” which can cause infections untreatable by antibiotics and spread that resistance to other germs. This “nightmare bacteria,” as the CDC called it, means hospitals and other healthcare facilities need to take “early and aggressive” action whenever a single case is found within their walls.

For people who qualify for subsidies to buy health coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the law led not only to expansions in the insured population but better access to care and more diagnoses of conditions like hypertension and high cholesterol.

The House and Energy Commerce Committee has sent letters to CMS and four hospital accreditation organizations (AOs), including the Joint Commission, asking for more information on how the entities conduct surveys and why there’s been a disconnect between their results and what state survey agencies find.

Providers should expect to see some concrete action taken soon on reducing the burden of quality reporting, according to a CMS presentation on the agency’s “Meaningful Measures” initiative at the HIMSS18 conference in Las Vegas.

Of the nine categories included in the 2019 Best Medical Schools rankings released by U.S. News and World Report, Harvard University either tied or placed alone at No. 1 in eight of them—the sole exception being the primary care category.

Patients with disabilities or living in poverty have poorer health outcomes and higher costs. Theoretically, alternative payment models (APMs) could encourage providers to better coordinate care for vulnerable populations and improve their outcomes—but they also have the potential to harm these patients, according to Karen Joynt Maddox, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.

The University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) in Baltimore has been cited for several violations on patient rights and hospital regulations after leaving a patient wearing only a hospital gown at a bus stop in January.