Timothy Gilligan, M.D., co-director of the Center for Excellence in Healthcare Communication at the Cleveland Clinic, and Mikkael Sekeres, M.D., director of the leukemia program at the Cleveland Clinic, provide a well timed caution on the physician communication training trend.

There has been no discernible lull in activity when it comes to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). ONC is full-steam ahead on multiple fronts despite calls for a slowdown.

With cost containment driving many health-care decisions, the temptation exists for hospital executives to judge a service line on speed and efficiency (and to overlook quality). In a service line such as radiology—for which accuracy is not easily assessed and quality measurements are not consistently reported—the inclination might be even stronger.

A carefully managed electronic data warehouse is a key component of improved patient care in any health-care practice and is surprisingly easy to build on and improve, once you begin the implementation process. Those were the key points of “Use of Registry Tools to Improve Care,” presented by David Howes, MD, in San Diego, California, on October 7, 2013, at the annual conference of the Medical Group Management Association. Howes is president and CEO of Martin's Point® HealthCare (Portland, Maine), a nonprofit health-care organization.

The requirements of Meaningful Use Stage 2 emphasize new levels of patient engagement and more and more studies are proving that patients more involved in their care can improve outcomes and reduce costs. 

In today’s transaction-based service model, patients make their own appointments, the care they get varies depending on the provider’s memory and skill level, and it is up to patients to coordinate and manage their own follow-up.

Cancer is on pace to be the no. 1 killer disease worldwide within the next 15 years, and already has overtaken heart disease in the United Kingdom, among other countries. Fortunately, innovative technologies in informatics and IT promise to improve cancer care, whether by bridging the gaps in standard radiology PACS for nuclear medicine or by finding ways to leverage big data for better diagnosis and monitoring.

Nearly a decade ago, when David Fox assumed the role of president and CEO of Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, Downers Grove, Illinois, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award-winning hospital held a somewhat moderate quality ranking. Employee satisfaction ranked in the 46th percentile and its physician hospital organization (PHO) was paying