The Leapfrog Group is now to hospitals as a teacher is to studentsat least in the age-old educators duty of grading exams from A for outstanding to F for failing. The Washington, D.C.-based healthcare-quality watchdog launched its hospital report-card system, the Hospital Safety Score, June 6 to show healthcare consumers how their local hospitals measure up on various criteria for safety.

Eleven integrated health systems have combined de-identified data from their EHRs to form a private-sector diabetes registry.

George Washington Universitys Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program in Washington, D.C., has launched an online resource, Health Information and the Law.

Which EHR documentation style best suits the quality of care a physician performs? Research published online May 19 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association suggested dictated EHR documentation appears to fare worse than structured and free text documentation.

The staff at Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) likely dont have easy days at the office. With notices of proposed rulemaking being drafted with great speed relative to traditionally thought-of government timelines, the onslaught of opinions from the public to reconcile should come as no surprise. Last week, the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) and Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) offered slightly differing opinions on the ICD-10 implementation process.

To properly evaluate and compare results that will aid in the implementation of the patient centered medical home (PCMH) effort and other initiatives, the Commonwealth Fund recommended a standard set of core measures in a data brief released this month.

Medication adherence may not be a useful performance measure, based on results of a study that assessed the association between medication adherence and blood pressure control at the clinic level. Treatment intensification may be a suitable metric for gauging quality, but the authors cautioned that it may prove difficult for some providers to capture the data accurately and may have unintended adverse consequences in some hypertensive patients.

A new study confirms the suspicion that infections contracted in hospitals correlate strongly with readmissions, prompting the authors to recommend that patients discharged with positive clinical cultures receive additional planning resources before heading home.