Five heart treatment centers in four states, along with an atrial fibrillation (AFib) patient advocacy group have formed a national alliance to improve arrhythmia treatment by sharing information on best practices, creating better care standards and gathering outcome information.

For a study appearing in Pediatrics, researchers took a look at the outcome measures of the Asthma Task Force changes implemented at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children and University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu, Hawaii. They found that yes, not surprisingly, better patient adherence to treatment plans correlated with a significant reduction in readmission rates.

Creating an accurate system for evaluating hospital quality for payments, as well as spotting areas where savings could be achieved and deaths prevented, is becoming increasingly important to health system leaders. However, the current list of hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) that Medicare uses to set payments for hospitals, may be too narrow finds an analysis of discharge codes conducted by the Premier Inc. healthcare alliance.

Reductions in falls, infections, adverse drug events, and other patient harm at hospitals participating in the Pennsylvania Hospital Engagement Network (PA-HEN) are collectively making a big impact on both health care spending and patient outcomes in the state says the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania.

Among the 887 sentinel events the Joint Commission recorded last year, the top three were delays in treatment that resulted in death or permanent disability; wrong-site, wrong-patient or wrong-procedure mistakes; and unintended retention of a foreign object after a procedure.

According to the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) Medical Directorship Compensation Survey, last year, more than 75 percent of the 1,621 medical directors that participated in the survey said their duties were specifically tied to patient-satisfaction and quality-of-care numbers. In addition, more than 35 percent reported that their duties were tied to patient safety metrics.

Falls in the inpatient setting prolong hospital stays, increase costs and can be fatal, but a Joint Commission program applying elements of Lean, Six Sigma and change management to healthcare process improvement reduced falls 35 percent when it was implemented by seven healthcare systems.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is taking on the problem of diagnosis errors in healthcare and has issued eight recommendations for how these types of medical errors could be reduced through policy and healthcare system changes.