Articles
Quality & Patient Safety
America’s Hospitals and Health Systems Remain More Dedicated than Ever to Patient Safety and Quality
By Akin Demehin
Hospitals have always worked diligently to improve patient safety, making many important strides in the last two decades. Yet, various reports and rankings of hospital performance in recent months might lead you to believe that hospitals have taken their foot off the gas. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, hospitals have never stopped focusing on improving the care they provide, even under the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Quality Measures
Blog: Sustaining Quality Transparency While Accounting for COVID-19’s Unprecedented Challenges
By Akin Demehin
Recent reports have mischaracterized Medicare’s proposals to account for the impact of COVID-19 in its quality measurement programs as “hiding” important and useful patient safety data from the public.
Star Ratings
Blog: Understanding CMS’ Changes to Hospital Overall Star Ratings
In 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) overhauled the Hospital Overall Quality Star Ratings methodology with the expressed purpose of making ratings more transparent, equitable, stable and predictable.
Affordable Care Act, Governance Effectiveness, Leadership, Legislation and Legislative Advocacy, Quality & Patient Safety, Strategic Planning
Quality measurement: Making it meaningful
By Akin Demehin
America’s hospitals are committed to sharing meaningful, accurate hospital quality information with the patients they serve. Hospitals also support well-designed pay-for-performance programs that can help move the health care delivery system from volume to value.
At the same time, however, hospitals, their clinicians and the post-acute care organizations they work with are asked to provide data on a dizzying array of quality measures. The burden of collecting many of these measures often outweighs the benefit, and consumers can be confused by the volume of information.
Financial Oversight, Legislation and Legislative Advocacy, Physician Fee Schedule (PFS)/MACRA/QPP, Physician Workforce, Quality & Patient Safety, Workforce
The Ins and Outs of Physician Payment After Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate Reform
On April 16, President Barack Obama signed into law the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015.