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.

A new study appearing in Health Services Research lends support to the argument of hospital operators that patients’ odds of being readmitted within 30 days of an inpatient stay may have more to do with the type of community the patient is released into than the quality of the care provided by the hospital.

The American Hospital Association is aiming to be one of the key groups that will fill the need for healthcare improvement professionals from different organizations to collaborate and share best practices.

Participation in the government’s Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) incentive payment program went up 36 percent from the previous year in 2012, and participation in the Electronic Prescribing (eRx) Incentive Program went up 22 percent.

In a move that may, depending on your perspective, either improve current hospital rating systems or create greater confusion, the Leapfrog Group, the leading non-profit hospital quality surveyor, and Castlight Health, a leading provider of cloud-based software for healthcare data, are partnering on a “consumer-friendly” analysis of nationwide hospital performance.

In a set of eight draft recommendations, the National Quality Foundation (NQF) addresses the concern that reimbursement models tied to outcome measures may unfairly penalize health systems serving greater numbers of poor patients.

A research study aimed at uncovering why poorer patients tend to have worse treatment outcomes finds that the quality of the hospitals serving poor communities may be a bigger factor than socioeconomic status in determining mortality risk after cancer surgery.