Eliminating Preventable Harm

In the U.S., 2.9% of individuals who enter a hospital are actually harmed by the medical care they receive.  Reducing these preventable iatrogenic injuries is one of the goals of any hospital administrator.  Paul Levy of Running a Hospital lists 3 goals to achieve in the new year which will help reduce these adverse events.…

Do global health ratings work?

Many health plans have used patient health ratings as important metrics for quality improvement.  The simplest way to evaluated the quality of a health plan is to ask all members to rate the plan from 1-10 and take the average score.  However, this simple averaging gives health plans an incentive to improve quality for low…

What makes patients choose your hospital?

Patients choose hospitals based on the quality of the medical care they receive and the hospital’s distance from their home.  But what nonclinical criteria do patients value most?  The Salud y Gestión blog reviews the findings of a study in The McKinsey Quarterly.  The study found that patients rank the following as the most important…

Should low quality hopsitals be given more or less money?

Recently, the San Diego Union Tribune reported that the Sharp Grossmont Hospital in eastern San Diego county was cited for a number of preventable deaths. Reporter Cherl Clark found numerous problems, which included: “staff members restraining a highly medicated, 25-year-old man with schizophrenia in such a way that he was allowed to suffocate. In addition,…

U.S. Health Care scores poorly

The Washington Post reports that U.S. Health Care [is] Still Ill. This conclusion comes from a report from the Commonwealth Fund titled Results from the National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2008. Even though the U.S. still spends more money on medical care than any other nation, performance on the Scorecard has not improved…

P4P: Be careful what you measure

Simon Caulkin, management editor of The Guardian, has a great article titled “The rule is simple: be careful what you measure.”  The article discusses the fact that measuring performance leads to better performance on the dimensions measured, but can often lead to significantly worse performance on the unmeasured dimensions.  For instance, What happens when bad…