U.S. hospitals adopting the ISO: 9001-2008 quality management system as a component in overall care improvement is a growing trend. Chris Crawford, vice president of Quality for Lee Memorial Health System in Fort Myers, Florida, answered our questions about why her hospital recently stopped seeking Joint Commission accreditation and instead became the first hospital in Southwest Florida and one of only 60 hospitals nationwide to achieve ISO: 9001-2008 certification through DNV GL.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley says her office has reached an agreement with Partners HealthCare that lets New England’s largest not-for-profit health system purchase an additional community hospital in the state in exchange for agreeing to adhere to certain terms that limit its ability to continue to grow and leverage its size and market dominance to raise prices.

Writing in Health Affairs, Martin Gaynor, director of the Bureau of Economics of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), in Washington, D.C., observed that given new findings on the impact of healthcare mergers on prices, it is important for the FTC to work with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other government agencies to maintain “antitrust enforcement and consumer protection in healthcare markets.”

Tuesday’s House Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health hearing on current hospital issues in the Medicare program demonstrated that there is broad agreement that last year’s “2-midnight rule” for determining hospital inpatient status in a more standardized way is not working as intended.

“The time has come for healthcare to govern its information,” said Meryl Bloomrosen, MBA, vice president of public policy for the American Health Information Management Association, speaking at the fourth annual CMS eHealth Summit on May 19. “Trust in health information depends on it.” Leaders from the association called for a greater focus across healthcare on information governance.

Quality of hospital care is improving more rapidly than quality of ambulatory care, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research Quality’s National Healthcare Quality Report 2013.

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.