The Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality of Johns Hopkins Medicine and Lockheed Martin are working together to build a better intensive care unit (ICU).

In a Dec. 15 letter to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., formally requested that the Institute of Medicine (IOM), to reduce alarm fatigue and create best practice guidelines for vendors developing computerized decision support (CDS) systems.

The Department of Health and Human Services released a bulletin Dec. 15, outlining proposed policies that will give states more flexibility and freedom to implement the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

The widespread belief among healthcare professionals that improved clinical care quality leads to reduced costs could be wrong. The fixed costs associated with operating a healthcare organization largely remain the same regardless of reduced resource utilization, Stephen Rauh, MBA, MS, argued in a Dec. 15 perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Quality measures are expected to play a large part in the fight to lower healthcare costs while increasing quality of care, but building quality measurement sets that are compatible with a wide range of EHRs and other health IT products has proven difficult for both vendors and healthcare provider organizations.

Independence Blue Cross (IBC), an independent, Philadelphia-based licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, announced that it has partnered with the American College of Physicians and will allow up to 100 practices one year of free access to its new online resource, the Medical Home Builder 2.0, which contains analytics tools designed to improve scheduling, patient education and coordination of care.

As hospital staffing units work to provide quality care to patients, their overarching goal must be to tie high quality with a low price tag. Now, a homegrown economic costing tool may help administrators better budget these programs. Researchers at Duke University have developed the TEAM-HF Costing Tool, which generates comprehensive cost estimates to help healthcare managers pinpoint healthcare interventions that are most valuable to patients.

Carl Sirio, MD, is leaving his job at the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia to take on three jobs at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio: vice president for medical affairs, associate dean for clinical affairs and CMIO. The multiple titles, Sirio said, reflect the healthcare systems need to break down silos and collaborate.