Nine-hospital health system HCA North Texas, based in Irving, is like most health care organizations in the United States: faced with a challenging financial environment, it needs to find innovative ways to do more with less. Explains Michael Hayes, director of asset management for the health system, "We have to streamline processes that

The two principal methods for ranking hospitals based on a composite performance measure for coronary artery disease (CAD) appear to be similarly capable of stratifying according to process of care, but neither showed a strong correlation with 30-day risk-standardized mortality or readmission rates, according to a study published Oct. 18 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. The authors urged that more studies be done to better understand measures ability to discriminate quality.

The U.S. healthcare system is not well designed to provide equitable care, as evidenced by the prevalence of disparities in care by race, ethnicity, language and social status, according to a study in the October issue of The Joint CommissionJournal on Quality and Patient Safety. As the United States invests in the design and implementation of health IT, consideration must be given to the impact that these innovations have on the quality and cost of healthcare for all patients, including those who experience disparities, wrote the study authors.

Big changes were made on the ground level of accountable care organization (ACO) activity this week. While the final ACO rule was released Oct. 20, a report from the Institute for Health Technology Transformation released this week outlined generalizable ACO characteristics and recommendations to providers interested in applying for ACO status.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) could be flipping the script on the requirements that hospitals and critical access hospitals must meet to participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The agency released a notice of proposed rulemaking stating that these proposed changes are an integral part of our efforts to reduce procedural burdens on providers.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released a final rule to revise the ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs) conditions for coverage to allow patient rights information to be provided to the patient, the patients representative or the patients surrogate prior to the start of the surgical procedure.

The American College of Cardiology (ACC) is expanding its outpatient registry, the PINNACLE Registry, with a new platform focusing on atrial fibrillation and including the next generation of anticoagulants.

Hospitals and health systems in the U.S. are facing an unparalleled force to change, according to the inaugural report of the American Hospital Association (AHA) Committee on Performance Improvement (CPI), which offered recommendations for practice management strategies for the healthcare environment of tomorrow.