2011

Growing Deficit May Threaten Health Reform Law More Than Elections, Supreme Court Ruling

Written by Jaimie Oh | December 19, 2011 Cost-controlling initiatives under President Obama’s landmark healthcare reform law may face greater risk of “running aground” as the country’s deficit continues to grow, according to a Reuters report. The healthcare reform law has drawn intense opposition from conservative leaders, and the question of its constitutionality will be […]

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NorthShore CEO: Supreme Court Decision Won’t Stop Healthcare Reform

By: Molly Gamble Mark Neaman, CEO of Evanston, Ill.-based NorthShore University HealthSystem, thinks most provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will survive even if the U.S. Supreme Court rejects the individual health insurance mandate, according to a Highland Park Pioneer Press report. While Mr. Neaman doesn’t think it will overturn the healthcare

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Google Helps Emergency Room Docs to Predict Flu Trend

Google, the search-engine giant, may be able to help doctors anticipate when they’ll get a surge in the number of patients they see with flu symptoms.

That’s the new finding from a team of doctors, based in Baltimore, who relied on Google Flu Trends, a service that tracks the number of flu-related Internet searches by folks like you and me. In an article this month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, those doctors, led by Dr. Richard Rothman, an emergency medicine physician at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine describe how data from Google Flu Trends stacked up against conventional systems to track the spread of flu

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Hospital workers don’t report 86% of patient harm events

By: Alicia Caramenico Hospital workers reported only about 14 percent of the patient-safety incidents experienced by Medicare beneficiaries discharged in October 2008, according to a new report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). Hospital staff failed to report the remaining 86 percent of patient harm events, partly due to staff misunderstanding what constitutes patient harm.

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You’ve Got Care

How technology is helping to bridge the gap between physicians and caregivers Currently in the United States, more than 29% of Americans are acting as caregivers for someone else. A majority of these caregivers also hold a full-time job, while they spend an estimated twenty hours a week providing patient care. With all this time

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5 Top-Paid Medical Specialties

Written by Rachel Fields Here are 13 statistics about compensation of the five highest-paid medical specialties, according to MGMA’sPhysician Compensation and Production Survey: 2010 Report Based on 2009 Data. 1. Orthopedic surgery — spine Orthopedic surgeons specializing in spine made an average of $710,055 in compensation in 2009. Orthopedic surgeons (spine) working in a multi-specialty

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Money Matters: How the Hospital Revenue Cycle Impacts Patient Satisfaction

Hospital leaders are increasingly prioritizing patient satisfaction, understanding that the experience of the patient impacts hospital finances, reputation and physician satisfaction. But one of the most crucial parts of the patient experience — the revenue cycle — is still neglected in favor of pushing customer satisfaction during the clinical encounter. Scott Morgan, chief strategy officer for Avadyne Health, discusses how the revenue cycle impacts patient experience — and what hospitals can do to improve their satisfaction ratings through interactions about money.

How revenue cycle affects the patient experience

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