Hospitals

Denmark may have lost the title of "happiest place on earth" to Costa Rica, but it still has health IT.

The Danish have, according to several studies, the most efficient health information system in the world. All primary care physicians and almost half of the hospitals utilize electronic records, in comparison to just 10 percent of hospitals and 17 percent of physicians here. The Danish information system saves doctors about 50 minutes a day in administrative work, and a 2008 report from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society estimates that the electronic records system saves Denmark $120 million annually.

Ebben Harrell of TIME provides a nice summary of the savvy and centralized Danish system:

Airplane analogies. Last decade, health care was full of them…and here in the first month of the Tens, researchers and quality advocates are wasting no time. We here at New Health Dialogue are just as guilty.

In the fall, Joanne Kenen and I reflected on the 10th anniversary of the Institute of Medicine’s landmark report, To Err Is Human. As hospitalist Bob Wachter reminds us, the number of Americans who die from preventable medical errors is roughly equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing every day. Of course, plane crashes are thankfully rare. There are 30,000 commercial flights per day in the U.S. and the average number of crashes per day is nearly zero. That's not luck.  It's because the aviation industry follows rigorous safety guidelines.

With the contemporary patient safety movement entering its second decade, a study conducted in New York and Rhode Island might provide clues for The Tipping Point for transforming all health care environments into cultures of safety.

In her post earlier this week about the debate about the future of the State Children's Health Insurance Program under health reform, Allison Levy mentioned the challenge of low Medicaid payment rates to doctors -- so low that many doctors won't take Medicaid payments. So while Medicaid on paper has a better benefit package than SCHIP, it's hard for low-income people to get those benefits if they don't have a doctor willing to take Medicaid patients.

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid probably hasn’t given too much thought to hiring an interior decorator to help him with the Senate health care bill.  But while most minds are concentrated on “evidence-based medicine,” Allison Arieff in an essay in  the New York Times this week argues that we should also give some thought to “evid

This Power Point Presentation was given by Leif Wellington Haase to the Southern California Cardiovascular Service Line Directors Meeting in Anaheim, California on October 20, 2009.

When you have a chance, get the grandparents away from watching those blood-pressure raising town halls on their televisions, and tell them this. Health reform is not about chopping Medicare. It's about making it better. And saving lives.

A test program now in its fourth year has shown how it can work. Hospitals that do a great job get rewarded. Those with a poor performance, get penalized.

This week, Kaiser Health News shined the spotlight on two high-performing health systems. KHN talked to Ascension Health President and CEO Anthony R. Tersigni, EdD, FACHE, and Denver Health CEO Patricia A.

Recently we had the chance to sit down and talk with Donna Katen-Bahensky, the president and CEO of University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics and a member of Health CEOs for Health Reform.

In the video below, Katen-Bahensky describes her organization's efforts to change the dynamics of modern medicine through the principles of accountable care organizations (ACO).

We wrote recently about Providence Medical Center in Everett, Washington, and itsr innovations in health care quality.

We wrote about the high rate of hospital readmissions recently on the blog and for The Washington Post/Kaiser Health News. Today, both the Wall Street Journal and NPR examine the problem, both focusing (as we did) largely on older people with heart disease.

NPR's Joseph Shapiro told the story of Jessica MacLeod, a nurse with advanced training at the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia. (We've written about Penn's Mary Naylor and their Transitional Care Model, too, here and here). MacLeod gets to know her patients in the hospital, and then follows them at home for two or three months, with particular attention to those first 48 hours when lots of things can go wrong.

One of her patients is Ken Rogers, 80, a retired superviser at a printing company. He recently spent a week in the hospital after experiencing chest pains.When he was hospitalized in the past, he recalled, "when I came out of the hospital, you go, 'Yeah? What do I do now?' It was, 'See ya,' " This time MacLeod was at his home within a day, and she returned often.