Quality | May 2018

The older a surgeon gets, the lower the patient mortality rate, with female surgeons in their 50s having the lowest rates overall, according to research led by Yusuke Tsugawa, MD, MPH, PhD, assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Commonwealth Fund’s 2018 scorecard on state health system performance saw the five highest-ranked states maintain their exact rankings from the last report, with Hawaii again claiming the No. 1 spot. The most striking finding was the surge in deaths from suicide, alcohol and overdoses from opioids and other drugs since 2005.

The Leapfrog Group’s 2018 Hospital Safety Grades found that a handful of facilities have made major strides in reducing infection rates and deaths due to error. Of the 2,500 hospitals examined, 89 receiving an A this year had previously been rated as a D or F.

The latest sentinel event alert from the Joint Commission said healthcare workers and organizations need to do better on reporting—and preventing—workplace violence, including verbal abuse that physicians and nurses too often too often dismiss as “part of the job.”

The Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), American Medical Association (AMA) and the American College of Physicians (ACP) are asking for changes to the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), with a wide group of stakeholders wanting the quality reporting period reduced to 90 days and ACP releasing a study determining many MIPS measures aren’t valid.

WalletHub, a personal finance website, ranked all 50 states and the District of Columbia in pediatric health. Vermont was No. 1 and Nevada was placed at the bottom in state-by-state rankings of children’s healthcare.

“Although medical devices provide great benefits to patients, they also present risks,” said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD. “And we are focusing equal attention on advancing new frameworks for identifying risks and protecting consumers.”

Critical access hospitals, ambulatory care and office-based surgical practices would be subject to new requirements for pain assessment and management under proposals released by the Joint Commission, with safe prescribing of opioids needing to be an “organizational priority” in all three settings.

Johnny Delashaw, MD, the former chief of the Swedish Neuroscience Institute (SNI), is suing the Seattle Times over what he alleges was a “false and defamatory” investigative article that damaged his reputation and led to his resignation and the suspension of his medical license.

After at least 10 patients received improper diagnoses owed to pathology lab errors, Winston Salem, N.C.-based Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center has been reviewing 9,291 cases ahead of a June deadline set by CMS that could strip its Medicare certification.