Despite sometimes extreme differences among five patient-centered medical home-like healthcare organizations that researchers identified as promising models for treating patients with complex healthcare needs, they generally shared several qualities that researchers considered essential.

The Joint Commission has appointed seven new members to its board of commissioners.

The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) delivery model is expected to coordinate and improve the quality of care, but little research has investigated the effects of the PCMH on provider and support staff morale, according to a report published Jan. 9 in the Archives of Internal Medicine. To learn how they feel, researchers surveyed employees of healthcare organizations with PCMH-like characteristics and received positive overall responses.

Despite federal regulations requiring hospitals participating in Medicare to develop and maintain Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement programs, hospital incident reporting systems only captured an estimated 14 percent of patient harm events experienced by Medicare beneficiaries discharged in October 2008, according to a January Office of Inspector General (OIG) report.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued an interim final rule with comment period where the agency will adopt standards for the HealthCare Electronic Funds Transfers and Remittance Advice transaction under HIPAA to mitigate administrative costs for providers.

Beginning in 2009 with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the decision to adopt ICD-10, federal efforts to encourage health IT implementation have formed a labyrinth of initiatives for health IT professionals to navigate, according to an article in the Journal of American Health Information Management Association.  

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has finalized an initial core set of 35 healthcare quality measures for Medicaid-eligible adults as required by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

In an effort to reduce healthcare costs, the U.S. has succeeded in getting the length of hospital stays for myocardial infarction (MI) down, but the tradeoff may be in higher readmission rates, according to a study that compared 30-day MI readmission rates in the U.S. and 16 other countries. The study in the Jan. 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that patients in the U.S. had the shortest median length of stay but also had a 68 percent increased risk of being readmitted within a month.