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Hospital Impact has been ranked one of the top 50 healthcare blogs by Wikio.
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Since my last blog post where I stressed the need for our continued commitment to push the patient experience movement forward I have had a positive, life-changing experience.
Early on Friday, April 19, as we were wrapping up Patient Experience Conference 2013, my wife called to let me know she was having contractions. "Nothing imminent," she calmly told me.
It is not often you spend three intense conference days stressing the critical importance of patient experience--of people and process, patient perspective, strategic imperative--only to turn around and be that patient or family member yourself. But those three days were followed by three days admitted to the hospital--experiencing labor and delivery (L & D), post-partum care and watching everything our caregivers did to provide for my wife, our new son and me.
by Alan Sager
In 1960, 42 acute care hospitals with 8,000 beds served Detroit's 1.7 million residents. But only four hospitals with 2,700 beds survived to serve 700,000 residents in 2010.
All of the survivors are costly major teaching hospitals. Especially in winter, ambulances are sometimes challenged to provide rapid response to the people of a 139-square-mile city whose residential side streets rarely see snow plows.
Detroit is not alone. Hospital "deserts" are conspicuous--and growing--in broad expanses of St. Louis, Cleveland, Washington, Atlanta, several Texas cities, New York City's boroughs, and elsewhere.
by Alicia Caramenico, FierceHealthcare
With critics around the country increasingly questioning whether nonprofit hospitals are providing enough charity care to justify their tax-exempt status, the pressure is on for nonprofits to demonstrate their charitable duties and put their financial assistance programs to work.
FierceHealthFinance talked to George Semko (pictured), vice president of Revenue Cycle at Meritus Health System in Maryland, about how the organization is serving financially disadvantaged patients in a post-reform healthcare landscape.
Read the full interview at FierceHealthFinance.
by Kent Bottles
The 91-7 confirmation by the U.S. Senate of Marilyn B. Tavenner as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services means we now have a permanent CMS leader for the first time since Mark B. McClellan, M.D., left the post in October 2006.
Republicans refused to allow a vote on Obama's first choice, Donald M. Berwick, M.D.; he served as acting administrator for 18 months under a recess appointment.
Does this bipartisan Senate vote mean we have finally accepted that the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land? Will all Americans now work together to ensure the new law will be fully implemented as smoothly as possible?
In a word, the answer to those questions is no.
That was a question a physician asked me at dinner last week and I answered simply, "World-class quality, safety and service at half the price."
Healthcare reform/transformation is a problem in the guise of a political conflict. What the two political parties argue over is who has the legal right to control and regulate the healthcare market: the federal government, state governments or private industry.
This is a war that has been waged since we began as a nation and it shows no sign of slowing.
Unfortunately, while corporate lobbyists spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defend their entrenched positions, our country is losing the increasingly global competition to provide high-quality, low-cost healthcare services.
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