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(American College of Physicians: Philadelphia) -- Four organizations representing more than 350,000 primary care physicians have released joint Guidelines for Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) Recognition and Accreditation Programs. The new guidelines—created by the American Academy of…
(Gemba Research LLC: Mukilteo, WA) -- Gemba Academy is celebrating its second anniversary and the release of its Leader Standard Work course by bringing back the most popular promotion Gemba Academy has ever done.
Specifically, between March 1 and March 31, anyone who purchases a six-month or a…
(McGraw-Hill: New York) -- Co-written by a certified project management professional and a medical doctor, Project Management for Healthcare Information Technology (McGraw-Hill, 2011) demonstrates how to integrate project management principles with health care information technology to achieve…
(MIT: Cambridge, MA) -- During about 30 percent of all heart attacks, people experience no symptoms. However, unmistakable signs of the attack remain in the bloodstream for days. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, working with Massachusetts General Hospital’s (MGH)…
President Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2011, which begins in October, includes funds to keep the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program (BPEP) ticking over, after a fashion, for another year. The $7.7 million currently on the table is less than the $9.9 million he requested and…
(ISPE: Tampa, FL) -- The International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE), a global not-for-profit association of 22,000 pharmaceutical science and manufacturing professionals, released the GAMP Good Practice Guide: A Risk-Based Approach to GxP Process Control Systems…
(DocLineUp: New York) -- DocLineUp, a leading provider of enterprise-level document management software, has announced the new release and breakthrough pricing on the DocLineUp Document Management System for Medical Device Manufacturers. The system is available immediately and at less than $10,000—…
(Cognex Corp.: Natick, MA) -- Cognex Corp. has announced a new option to deliver its VisionView operator interface to third-party CE panels. VisionView CE software can now be licensed and installed directly onto Rockwell and Siemens CE panels, allowing end-users to use existing equipment and…
Pay-for-performance targets set for general practitioners in the United Kingdom are failing to improve the health of patients with high blood pressure, according to a joint study funded by U.K., U.S., and Canadian research organizations.
The study, which presents the strongest evidence yet that…
(Sparta Systems: Holmdel, NJ) – On Jan. 4, President Obama signed into law one of the most comprehensive changes to U.S. food safety since the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The Food Safety Modernization Act gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and related government agencies the…
Electron microscopes are among the most widely used scientific and medical tools for studying and understanding a wide range of materials, from biological tissue to miniature magnetic devices, at tiny levels of detail. Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)…
(National Quality Forum: Washington) -- Two new studies by the National Quality Forum (NQF) are designed to promote future work in clinical decision support (CDS) and expand the understanding of the benefits of health information technology (HIT) tools on care delivery.
The reports “lay the…
(ACSI: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Steady or improving customer satisfaction with several types of financial services is not enough to overcome the customer satisfaction challenges of the health insurance industry, according to a recent report released by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The…
U.S. health care organizations, from multihospital systems to rural community health centers, are gearing up for the challenge of their times: the effect of health care reform on how they care for patients and how they run their operations. Future health care organizations will need to find a way…
(Harvard Medical School: Boston) -- Researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMA) and Massachusetts General Hospital have found wide disparities among four common measures of hospitalwide mortality rates, with competing methods yielding both higher and lower-than-expected rates for the same…
Most Massachusetts physician groups are using results from a statewide patient survey to help improve patient experiences, but a significant number are not making use of the information or are making relatively limited efforts, according to a new RAND Corp. study.
Although physician…
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- From newborns switched in the nursery to medication mix-ups and hospital-acquired infections, we are all familiar with the horror stories about hospital safety. The safety issue in U.S. hospitals has become so profound and embedded, that we cannot hope to fix it…
(Institute for Healthcare Improvement: Cambridge, MA) -- During Dec. 9–12, some 50 patient activist leaders travelled to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) National Forum on Quality Improvement in Orlando, Florida, to share experiences and consider ways to combine forces to be that…
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- In the book Leading the Lean Healthcare Journey: Driving Culture Change to Increase Value (CRC Press, 2010), by Joan Wellman, Patrick Hagan, and Dr. Howard Jeffries, every health care organization can learn from Seattle Children’s Hospital’s continuous improvement…
(Productivity Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- What does the production line at a car manufacturer have to do with a doctor scrubbing in for brain surgery?
A lot, as it turns out.
For almost 10 years, Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle has adopted the essential principles of the Toyota…
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n his new book, Essentials for the Improvement of Healthcare Using Lean & Six Sigma (CRC Press, 2010), author Diomidis H. Stamatis (aka Dean) presents solutions to the problems that plague the health care industry by providing case studies and explaining a multitude of quality tools and…
The term “never events” refers to particularly shocking medical errors that should never occur (e.g., wrong-site, wrong-patient, wrong-procedure surgeries). There are other terms used in official capacities for such errors, but none have captured the nation’s attention or perhaps done more toward…
(Morehead: Charlotte, NC) -- Morehead, the human-capital research firm, will host a webinar titled “Secrets of a Winning Healthcare Organization.” The free hour-long webinar will be broadcast on Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2010 at 1 p.m. EST.
Rod Wilkes, senior vice president of Morehead’s Client…
(Connexall: Boulder, CO) -- Connexall, a leader in enterprise middleware for health care alarm management, lean-enabling workflow automation, and comprehensive reporting, is helping to improve patient satisfaction at one of the nation’s foremost cancer treatment facilities. The technology enables…
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ealth care reform, insurance changes, more insured patients, never events, changing reimbursements, accountable care organizations, medical home—what does it all mean? How do we react? How do we keep up with all the changes? The questions are many, and the answers are few, so what do we do…