• News

    Early Follow-up Can Reduce Readmission Rates

    May 22, 2016

    Heart failure patients who had early follow-up (within seven days of discharge) with general medicine or cardiology providers had a lower risk of being readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, according to a study from Kaiser Permanente published in the journal Medical Care. “We found that foll

  • 1
    News

    Dr. Hospitalist: Improper, Aggressive Billing Raises Ethical, Legal Concerns

    May 21, 2016

    Dear Dr. Hospitalist: I am a seasoned hospitalist at a large academic medical center in the Northeast and have recently become more bothered by how our group is being coerced to aggressively bill for our services.

  • News

    Barriers to Achieving High Reliability

    May 10, 2016

    The conceptual models being used in healthcare’s efforts to achieve high reliability may have weaknesses, according to Marc T. Edwards, MD, MBA, author of “An Organizational Learning Framework for Patient Safety,” published in the American Journal of Medical Quality.

  • 1
    News

    Is Email an Endangered Species?

    May 10, 2016

    Forty-five years ago, an engineer in Boston sent an electronic message between two computers some 10 feet apart.

  • 1
    News

    Benefits of Hospital-Wide Mortality Reviews

    May 9, 2016

    Death is a subject everyone cares about—but we could talk about it more, especially in hospitals, where a lot of people die.

  • News

    Tackling the Readmissions Problem

    May 7, 2016

    Virtually every hospital system in the country deals with the challenge of readmissions, especially 30-day readmissions, and it’s only getting worse.

  • News

    New Hospitalist Billing Code Should Benefit Hospitalists, Patients

    May 5, 2016

    The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that within the year hospitalists will be assigned their own specialty designation code. [caption id="attachment_14677" align="alignright" width="300"] Illustration/Paul Juestrich; Photos Shuttershock.com[/caption] Up to

  • News

    Five Situations Where Hospitalists Need a Healthcare Attorney

    May 4, 2016

    It is inevitable that, at some point in your career, you will need to hire a healthcare attorney. Proper representation is the best way to ensure a positive outcome in any situation. [caption id="attachment_12942" align="alignright" width="150"] Dr.

  • News

    Benefits of Earlier Palliative Care

    May 3, 2016

    Offering palliative care early to hospitalized patients with multiple serious conditions could improve care and help reduce healthcare spending, according to “Palliative Care Teams’ Cost-Saving Effect Is Larger for Cancer Patients with Higher Numbers of Comorbidities,” published in Health Affairs.

  • News

    Email Alerts Can Help Improve Quality in a Hospital

    May 3, 2016

    Alert emails can be a simple, low-cost means of improving quality in a hospital, as the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston learned.