CMS’ final rule for the Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment System in fiscal year 2014 includes several changes related to quality and patient safety. Here are some of the major quality- and safety-related provisions in the final rule, based on a CMS fact sheet: 1. CMS will implement the Hospital-Acquired...

If Silicon Valley venture capitalists were trying to fix broken health care systems, they would invest in multiple solutions at once and expect most to fail. But they would take action. That was the message from Rebecca Costa, an evolutionary biologist and a keynote speaker at the Colorado Health...

Three years ago, Henry Ford Health System began to overhaul how its doctors and nurses care for patients outside the Detroit-based system’s six hospitals. Now it must face the economic strains of its own success, as fewer patients turn up to fill hospital beds. Since January, the number of...

“Improving Incentives to Free Motivation,” calls for an approach to payment reform that harnesses the inherent motivation that doctors and patients have to make good decisions about health care. The authors reject the assumption that health care costs will drop and quality will improve if policymakers and payers simply...

On July 16, two New York City hospital networks announced they were merging to create the largest health care system in the metropolitan area and one of the biggest in the country. The CEO of one of the hospitals said the merger would pave the way for more “efficient”...

Despite some unique challenges, safety-net hospitals are achieving strong patient satisfaction results by focusing on compassionate care and quality outcomes. Do hospitals that treat more low-income, ethnically diverse patients with multiple comorbidities have a tougher time getting good patient experience scores than other hospitals, as some organizations contend? And...

Several Medicare Pioneer accountable care organizations that didn’t produce savings in the first year of the Obama administration’s most ambitious test of the accountable care model have told the CMS they will leave the Pioneer program and enter the Medicare Shared Savings Program model, while another two participants have...

Medicare is accelerating plans to peg a portion of doctors’ pay to the quality of their care. The changes would affect nearly 500,000 physicians working in groups. The federal health law requires large physician groups to start getting bonuses or penalties based on their performance by 2015, with all doctors...

The U.S. News & World Report “Best Hospitals” rankings for 2012-13 were released last week, followed by the usual media hoopla and a few chest-thumping press releases from hospitals at the top of the list. Whether the rankings actually mean anything is an entirely different story. The highest-ranked hospitals...