quality patient care

The evolving healthcare landscape has created a wealth of fresh opportunities for payers. There is a sense of urgency for payers in leadership roles to leverage technology and successfully transition to a value-driven healthcare system that rewards top performers and high quality standards. Passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) quickly changed many aspects of payers' business with higher costs, new oversight, more competition and a longer-term promise of millions of new members. Since healthcare insurance reform became law, opponents have vowed changes, if not its outright repeal. While it may be tempting to take as little action as possible and hope that the 2010 mid-term election or 2012 general election will make this all go away, the reality is that repeal is not a likely possibility.

Fresenius Medical Care North America is the premier provider of the highest quality healthcare to people with renal and other chronic conditions. In the US, 640,000 people live their lives with end-stage renal disease. Worldwide, more than three million people suffer from chronic kidney failure. Through its industry-leading network of 2,200 dialysis centers in the U.S., outpatient cardiac and vascular labs, and urgent care centers—as well as North America’s largest practice of hospital and post-acute care providers—Fresenius Medical Care North America provides coordinated care for over 180,000 U.S. patients.

With the right EHR in place, participation in health care quality management programs not only helps you provide great care to your patients, but can also help increase your bottom line. However, the rewards are only worth seeking if the cost—in time and money—of collecting and reporting data to these quality programs doesn't outrun the potential gain. This is where your EHR and the services provided by your EHR vendor can make a significant difference.

Learn how to replace your hospital’s manual process for medication teaching and see how you can greatly improve consistency, efficiency, and measurability.

Learn how to improve the efficiency of your pain management workflow and see how these changes will improve the day to day tasks for your nurses allowing them to work more effectively.

Learn how interactive patient whiteboards will improve care coordination while also increasing patient satisfaction and see how this can increase productivity of all hospital workers.

In the midst of industry consolidation, shrinking margins, and fierce competition for talent, health care payers are facing increasing pressure to deliver more cost efficient, high-quality patient care. Learn how to succeed in this dynamic healthcare market by integrating financial and HR systems to tackle immediate challenges and create scalability for the future.

For hospitals, medication reconciliation is critical to quality patient care. Obtaining a complete and accurate list of the patient’s medications sets the cornerstone for good patient care during the hospital stay, informing doctors about treatments in progress, and arming them to prevent potentially harmful drug interactions.

Healthcare technologies have proven their worth for practitioners and facilities in increasing the quality of patient care while saving time and streamlining operations. In some cases, however, the benefits of these technologies are outweighed by their impact on the network, slowing network performance sometimes to the point of ineffectiveness.Software-defined networking can be the bridge to help healthcare providers update their networks and avoid disruption. SDN helps organizations save money on networking infrastructure, reduces the complexity of managing networks, enhances security through added intelligence and simplifies compliance, among other benefits.

The Ohio State University Health Plan manages healthcare insurance benefits and wellness resources for the university’s 29,000 employees, as well as their spouses and dependents. The Ohio State University is one of the nation’s top 20 public universities, and its Wexner Medical Center ranked #3 among 104 academic medical centers that were included in the 2014 University Health System Consortium Quality and Accountability Study. The health plan, medical center and university work together to help deliver safe, efficient, patient centered care to its members.

St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center has a total of 310 refrigerators throughout the organization. These items require strict temperature ranges for quality patient care and safety. Regulatory agencies perform audits requiring logs of temperature monitoring and corrective actions. Read this case study to learn about how St. Joseph's deployed the wireless AeroScout Environmental Monitoring solution to leverage its wireless network by working with STANLEY Healthcare.

Florida Hospital Celebration Health has long recognized that nursing is a key factor in the efficient delivery of high quality patient care. Nursing also represents the hospital’s highest cost of labor. Given these factors, administrators at Celebration Health sought business intelligence tools to better understand current nursing performance and pinpoint opportunities for workflow improvements leading to higher patient and staff satisfaction. Read this case study to learn more about how Florida Hospital Pioneers used RTLS and business intelligence to analyze and improve nursing workloads and workflows.

Virdee Medical, a busy private pediatric practice, traded paper charts for a hosted Allscripts solution in 2010. Now, with the improved efficiencies of Allscripts Professional in a hosted environment, Virdee Medical can focus more intently than ever on providing the highest quality patient care.

Poor quality of care takes a tremendous toll, not just on the system as a whole, but on the patients and their families at the center of that system. It also has a tremendous effect on employers, who already face unsustainable health care costs. When we evaluated one of our customer's claims, we found numerous signs of preventable complications that had cost our client significant amounts, not to mention the toll on the individual. Specifically, we identified the following preventable hospital- acquired conditions (HACs): • Fourteen instances of stage III and IV pressure ulcers • Twelve instances of vascular catheter-associated infections • Thirteen instances of catheter-associated urinary tract infections • One instance of a patient dying or experiencing a serious disability associated with intravascular air embolism • Five instances of foreign objects remaining in patients after a procedure. Please download the whitepaper to learn more!

Mobile devices help clinicians improve the quality of patient care and save lives by improving staff communication and collaboration, and by providing instant access to a wealth of mission-critical information — from real-time lab results to a change in a patient’s condition or verification of the “5 rights” of medication administration at the patient bedside. In addition, mobility also helps healthcare organizations comply with important governmental and regulatory safety standards, without tasking an already overburdened nursing staff with additional paperwork. This white paper provides guidance for planning and implementing a clinical mobility solution in today’s healthcare environment, including a five-step roadmap to help key stakeholders identify needs.

Digital technology continues to play an ever-increasing role in today’s modern healthcare systems. While 95% of hospitals in the United States have implemented Electronic Health Records or EHR, much work remains.1 Patient identification errors continue to plague hospitals and are the precipitating factor for 13% of surgical mistakes and 67% of transfusion mix-ups.2 Nationally, medication errors cause at least one death every day and injure 1.3 million people annually.3 The cost of lost lives, reduced productivity and malpractice insurance fees are debilitating the healthcare industry. At the center of every hospital’s safety program is the patient wristband, which provides caregivers access to the information they need at every point of care during the patient stay. However, not all wristbands are of equal quality. Some wristbands are not durable enough to withstand the rigors of a busy hospital environment, leading to workarounds and mistakes that, in the end, comprise patient care. H

Digital technology continues to play an ever-increasing role in today’s modern healthcare systems. While 95% of hospitals in the United States have implemented Electronic Health Records or EHR, much work remains.1 Patient identification errors continue to plague hospitals and are the precipitating factor for 13% of surgical mistakes and 67% of transfusion mix-ups.2 Nationally, medication errors cause at least one death every day and injure 1.3 million people annually.3 The cost of lost lives, reduced productivity and malpractice insurance fees are debilitating the healthcare industry. At the center of every hospital’s safety program is the patient wristband, which provides caregivers access to the information they need at every point of care during the patient stay. However, not all wristbands are of equal quality. Some wristbands are not durable enough to withstand the rigors of a busy hospital environment, leading to workarounds and mistakes that, in the end, comprise patient care. H

"Consolidation in the healthcare industry has reached such a pace that the number of health systems in the United States is on track for a 50% reduction over the next decade, making change management a high priority. In the healthcare world, where employee engagement can directly affect the quality of patient care, it’s important for organizations to have a solid change management stategy that allows for a smooth transition, communicates expected benefits and gets employees on board with change. Learn more."

The risks of irregular maintenance and non-compliance of IT and security policies are not only measured in dollars lost but in lives saved. With such a complex and critical proposition, efficiency is paramount to fulfilling the organization’s mission of providing quality, timely patient care.

With the combination of electronic health records, rich repositories of claims data, medical device outputs, laboratory and prescription systems, real-world data and the data mined from other information technology systems, the health and life sciences ecosystem can now gain new perspective. Download this complimentary paper to learn more about how health care data has the power to transform the sector, helping to address the industry’s biggest challenges surrounding costs and quality of patient care. By adopting solutions that allow them to both produce and consume data analytics insights in a way that better guides clinical and business strategies, innovative health care organizations can learn not only to survive but also thrive in the decades to come.

Maximizing patient safety and improving the quality of care is the ultimate goal for healthcare providers. Doing so requires staying within regulatory compliance, while also advancing staff retention and meeting fiscal constraints. Barcode technologies provide a “virtual voice” to patients, applications and workflows. Barcoding accomplishes this by laying a solid foundation for enhancing patient identification, providing visibility into medical practices, and driving efficiencies throughout healthcare applications, and is an integral part of electronic medical record (EMR) adoption. Download to learn more!

Healthcare providers and healthcare plans enterprises are facing significant and challenges to improve quality of care and patient satisfaction while controlling rising costs. Read on about making a case for improved efficiency in healthcare.

The healthcare industry is poised for a transformation in patient care. Learn how IBM Patient Care can help leverage the full breadth of patient information, from across systems and providers to create a complete picture of health and more.

Solving critical healthcare IT challenges with software-defined networkingDigitization is changing healthcare forever as organizations look to deliver better quality services, improve patient safety and provide the highest levels of security. Healthcare IT leaders should look to leverage a software-defined network. Read the latest from ZK Research to learn more.

Download this Interactive Resource Guide today to learn more about the role GE Healthcare plays in optimizing healthcare organizations’ investment in imaging IT to help streamline healthcare costs, increase diagnostic confidence and enhance the quality of patient care.