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
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.
![1]()
Opinion
8 Lessons for Hospitalists Turned Entrepreneurs
May 7, 2016
If you are a hospitalist, you are an entrepreneur almost by definition. All hospitalists are continuously engaged in improving the hospital experience for our patients.
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.
News
Proposals Pave the Way for New Drugs
April 30, 2016
To promote achievable solutions in the ongoing debate on drug financing, Anthem, Inc.
News
Video Feedback Can Be a Helpful Tool for QI, Patient Safety
April 30, 2016
Procedures are the most expensive item in healthcare, but tremendous variation remains in quality. “In part that’ s because we have weak systems of peer support and in part because medicine sanctions a physician to do procedures, and then for the next 40 or 50 years, a surgeon can receive no inpu
![1]()
Opinion
Attributes of Successful Hospitalist Groups
April 27, 2016
In the first two installments of my own list of attributes that are important underpinnings of successful hospitalist groups, I covered group culture and decision making, recruiting, the importance of a written policy and procedure manual and performance dashboard, and roles for advanced practice cl
