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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
