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Hospital Impact has been ranked one of the top 50 healthcare blogs by Wikio.
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by Gwen Darling
As hospitals continue to focus on demonstrating "meaningful use," one thing has become clear: The hunt for experienced Healthcare IT professionals is on, and the competition is fierce.
Fortunately many excellent educational programs are in full swing, working to produce the workforce of tomorrow. But in the meantime, any hospital employee who has played an integral part in a successful EMR implementation is one hot commodity. And if that employee happens to be certified in one or more key vendors' software modules? That employee isn't just hot, but on fire.
Colleagues across the country tell me that their patient volumes are soft which is driving their expenses out of line with expectations when adjusted for volume.
This is a growing issue as inpatient volumes continue to be flat or down for lower acuity patients while many hospitals are experiencing growth and stronger volumes in some of their more complex patient populations, who need implantable devices such as stents, pacemakers, and total joint replacements.
When the expense of high cost, complex volume is spread across a smaller base of adjusted patient days, the expenses are naturally inflated.
In times like these, supply chain executives and their teams have to be ever more diligent in helping end users right size their purchasing and inventory practices,
It's no secret that Americans are getting fatter and that more Americans can expect to get sick and die from obesity-related complications, such as heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
But while it is great news that people are universally acknowledging that obesity is a huge health issue, the current healthcare system does not position physicians (and other practitioners) to best leverage their skills, wisdom, heart and energy to help individual patients understand and address the root causes of their obesity.
Back-office automation and process improvements have rarely been a high priority for U.S. hospitals, writes Jim McDowell, senior director for healthcare insight and industry strategy at Oracle Corp. in Phoenix.
Over the past dozen years alone, hospitals and integrated delivery networks (IDNs) have focused on everything from the Y2K problem to primary medical records system overhauls, and now the push for health information exchanges and meaningful use threatens to keep back-office systems squarely on the back burner. FierceHealthFinance
by Brian Lapidus
In the interest of full disclosure, let me note one fact: The title of this piece is a misnomer.
Why?
It's simple: You can't prevent a security breach.
In fact, when it comes to experiencing a data breach, the question is not if, but when. That's why an organization's security plan shouldn't focus on prevention alone.
Your organization must be in the best defensible position to handle a data breach when the inevitable hits.
Like you, I see two distinct groups who do not play well in the same sandbox-clinical and IT.
Sometimes one group will try to quickly learn skills from the other group.
But having members of one group go to the other's summer camp to pick up a few skills will not qualify them to pull a few costly and hairy projects from the bowels of project hell anymore than having an IT executive take an EMT course would qualify that person to perform surgery. Studying anything for a brief period does not mean you're qualified to perform that task.
HIPAA is a common term in hospitals. If your hospital or health system is like ours, you spend a lot of time training, reminding and testing all employees on what is covered by HIPAA laws. For the most part, I believe employees understand the law and what they need to do to protect our patients and their privacy. Hospital employees sign agreements and promise to uphold their end of the deal, realizing there will be consequences if there are violations.
But for some strange reason, when it comes to social networks, employees seem to forget they are bound by those same regulations.
by Neil Versel, FierceMobileHealthcare
Once an upstart, Google's open-source Android operating system has grown into a formidable player in the world of smartphones. And with the growth in its user base has come a flood of apps.
With a little help from Google and an app developer or two, FierceMobileHealthcare has compiled a list of free and interesting healthcare-related apps that help make the lives of healthcare professionals and patients a little easier. Start slideshow
Now that there is scary.
Most people have been assuming that with healthcare reform, everyone will opt to have insurance and therefore seek care routinely.
But little is being said of the option to opt out of insurance or the types of coverage that will be available. Consider that people with high deductible plans, even though insured, are now and will continue to opt to delay or skip care. Healthcare reform has not brought us pricing reform and from all indications health premiums are still rising and will keep rising. And the employer landscape would suggest that high deductible plans are becoming the norm not the exception.
By Cathy Leahy
So the federal government's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has decided that their breach notification final rule under the HITECH Act needs further review. Apparently they got an earful from privacy advocates so they decided to scrap it and start over.
Those of us in healthcare rarely see life through the patient's or family's eyes. Yet there is much we can learn from first-hand experience as patients or their families. When we do experience our healthcare system up front and personal, we walk away with an experience that can change us forever.
Readers of my posts are aware of my decision to leave my hospital CEO position in Colorado at the end of 2009 to return to Chicago and help my wife with her ailing father. As I wrote then, it was a very hard decision, but family comes first.
That situation, which has brought us up close and personal with the healthcare system, ended in early July when my father-in-law, after suffering a stroke in June, succumbed to his multiple ailments.
Read more!