Category Archives for Industry News

Happy patients could mean more money for hospitals.

Pay-for-performance has become popular among policy makers and private and public payers.

Hospitals could be given more money from the Government if patients are happy with their care, under Pay-for-performance initiatives.

“Pay-for-performance” is an umbrella term for financial incentives to hospitals, physicians, and other health care providers who focus on the general happiness of their patients. Which are aimed at improving the quality, efficiency, and overall value of health care

The Affordable Care Act includes a number of provisions which are designed to encourage quality of care. The best known programs under the law that would be considered pay-for-performance are Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), groups of providers that agree to be held accountable for the quality and cost of services they provide.Pay-for-performance arose in the early 2000s as concerns about potentially compromised quality and constraints on patients having access to providers of their choice grew from both providers and consumers.

 Also, serious deficiencies in the quality of US health care had been highlighted in two major reports by the Institute of Medicine, among other studies. Pay-for-performance, it was thought, was a way for payers to focus on quality with the expectation that doing so would also reduce costs.

Some have concerns that the pay-for-performance model will have negative results, and a few studies have showed mixed or short-lived results in performance scores.

While results are still mixed, a recent study did show positive effects of incentivizing based upon performance within small HER-enabled clinics.

For more reading on the issue take a look at the study abstract here.

To learn more about the ActionCue hospital risk management software click here.

Want happy patients? It starts with happy hospital staff.

Engage your staff and be ‘amazed’ at what follows. Historically, hospitals have adopted a patient-centric mission. But Beryl Companies CEO Paul Spiegelman and Britt Berrett, President of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, part of the Texas Health Resources system, suggest in a recent article that if hospitals can find meaningful ways to raise the morale or their staff (read: happiness), the rest of their clinical and financial goals, as well as their patient satisfaction scores, will follow.

“If you focus on building internal engagement, that will drive patient engagement and loyalty and that will drive financial sustainability,” Spiegelman said. There are many ways to improve morale. Providing the best systems and processes to address your Risk, Quality and Performance Improvement initiatives is a great place to start.

Before you click away thinking this is just a shameless plug for our ActionCue hospital risk management software, take a minute to think about the current system you are using in your hospital to manage your Risk, Quality and performance improvement initiatives. If your hospital is like most, you are still using home-grown paper or excel spreadsheet systems. I am willing to bet you spend an overwhelming amount of time putting together reports for hospital executives that are based on information days, weeks or even months old. And… I’m also willing to wager that you wish there was a better, easier and faster way to do you job.

Current Risk and Quality Management systems in healthcare organizations is the source for a lot of wasted time and frustration in over 70% of hospitals nation-wide. Improving working conditions for all levels of hospital staff (executives, nurses, risk, quality and performance improvement managers) can and will increase staff morale — and in turn, better patient care quality.

So if you don’t smile just a little bit when you think about your current Risk/Quality Management, Performance Improvement system then you need to consider why and what you can do to improve it.

Be happy, try ActionCue Clinical Intelligence.

To read the full article from the Texas Health Resources system, click here.

To learn more about the ActionCue hospital risk management software click here.

Readmissions Are Gonna Cost You.

The converse side of saving money from the implementation of performance improvement, incident reporting systems, and a culture of quality, is losing a whole lot more due to bad outcomes, poor incident management and patient readmissions.

According to a report out by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), between January and November 2011 hospitals spent $41.3 billion treating patients readmitted within 30 days of discharge. Of that number, nearly 1.8 million readmissions cost the Medicare program $24 billion, 600,000 privately insured patient readmissions totaled $8.1 billion, 700,000 Medicaid patient readmissions cost hospitals $7.6 billion and uninsured patients were readmitted at a  cost of $1.5 billion.

Highlighting the need for the healthcare industry adopt new means of tracking adverse incidents, the AHRQ said in the study, “[I]dentifying conditions that contribute the most to the total number of readmissions and related costs for all payers may aid healthcare stakeholders in deciding which conditions to target to maximize quality improvement and cost-reduction efforts,”.

It is this simple task of tracking adverse events which most hospitals have no efficient means of recording and acting on. Recent statistics report that nearly 75% of all hospitals in the United States are utilizing antiquated systems, relying on paper or spreadsheets, for their Risk and Quality Management. However, healthcare is coming around to performance improvement technologies pioneered and perfected in other industries — such as manufacturing — which provide real-time, accurate insight into a hospital’s quality program.

At first it takes some time to understand why an IT approach, to what has traditionally just been a passive reporting method of quality improvement, is preferable. But, it is the real-time insight that a thoughtful algorithm, within an Incident Management Software like ActionCue Clinical Intelligence, can provide which is so invaluable.

In today’s day-and-age, it is no longer necessary for patient safety and hospital management data to be delayed by days, weeks or months. Inexpensive, web-based systems, like ActionCue, deliver immediate information to staff at all levels of a hospital’s organization, allowing for a prompt and precise response to patient safety and healthcare quality issues — improving patient care and reducing hospital costs.

Hospital Quality Initiatives Save Nearly $1.5B

In 2012, more than 1,500 hospitals participated with the Hospital Engagement Network (HEN) in an initiative aimed at reducing harm and cutting readmissions of patients, which led to saving more than $1.3 billion, according to a statement from the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET).

HEN, a collaboration between Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) and the American Hospital Association (AHA), is focused on improving healthcare quality, improve hospital infrastructures and promote a culture of quality.

In a news release by HRET, the program prevented:

• • Nearly 19,000 early-elective deliveries
  • More than 11,000 readmissions
  • More than 8,500 infections

“The latest results from the HEN effort are outstanding and highlight the success that quality improvement professionals can make within their hospitals and health systems,” said Maulik Joshi, president of HRET and senior vice president for AHA.

This should be beacon for hospital executives and administrators who are searching for ROI on the quality and performance initiatives they are funding. Innovations in healthcare quality IT incident management and hospital management software, like the ActionCue application, are revolutionizing how hospitals provide care to patients. By introducing IT technologies perfected in other industries to the performance and quality management of hospitals, it is now becoming possible for administrators and front-line staff to visualize, in real-time, the performance of their hospital — allowing for near immediate actions to correct adverse incidents — preventing bad outcomes, improving patient care and dramatically reducing hospital costs.

2014 Texas CAH Conference & Tradeshow

The Prista team is looking forward to attending and exhibiting at this year’s Texas CAH Critical Access Hospital Conference & Tradeshow.

The 2014 CAH Conference & Tradeshow, hosted by TORCH (http://www.torchnet.org) at the Hyatt Regency Lost Pines Resort in Cedar Creek, Texas, June 25-26, includes two days of networking, sessions, a trade exhibit hall, and is the only educational and networking event of its kind for CAHs in Texas.

Great speakers.

For our part, Prista will be in attendance to listen to David Pearson, MPA FACHE, President/CEO of TORCH, who is scheduled to speak on advocacy issues facing CAH facilities; and to hear Brad Denton, Director, Texas State Office of Rural Health (SORH) provide updates on the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility (FLEX) Program, and to stay up-to-date on Meaningful Use requirements.

We will also be showcasing our flagship healthcare online application, ActionCue® Clinical Intelligence, a patient safety software, helping hospitals around the country to reduce costs and improve patient care through an insightful, integrated Quality Management, Incident Reporting, and Performance Improvement platform.

Come see us!

If you are planning to attend the 2014 CAH Conference & Tradeshow, drop by our booth and learn more about the ActionCue Clinical Intelligence application. You can register online for the 2014 Texas CAH Conference & Tradeshow on the TORCH.org site, or download the registration form and mail it in. Click here for PDF of the program agenda. Find out how ActionCue Clinical Intelligence can improve your hospital’s patient safety and dramatically reduce adverse incidents; saving your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Not planning to attend?

Learn about ActionCue® Clinical Intelligence by visiting our website at PristaCorp.com.