Hospitals as Hotels

More evidence: “One patient who gave the hospital low satisfaction scores, particularly on room cleanliness, was contacted to explain why, [Jim] McManus [vice president of finance at St. Joseph’s Health system in Southern California] said. It wasn’t that the room was dirty, the patient replied. He wanted the cleaning schedule to mirror a hotel experience—cleaned…

Measuring Hospital Efficiency

Medicare recently released the Medicare Spending per Beneficiary (MSPB) measure on Hospital Compare. This measure includes all payments to doctors, hospitals or other facilities for services provided to a patient during the three days before the hospital stay, during the stay, and during the 30 days after discharge from the hospital. Kaiser Health news provides…

Medicare Spending per Beneficiary

Medicare’s Hospital Compare website evaluates hospital quality.  One of the most recent measures to be added to Hospital Compare is a measure of efficiency.  The measure calculates a price-standardized, case-mix adjusted measure of spending during period before, during and after a hospital admission. The Healthcare Economist (Jason Shafrin) and a team at Acumen (including Tom…

MassHealth P4P: Did it work?

Massachusetts’ Medicaid program instituted a pay-for-performance program in 2008.  Did it work?  According to this paper, the answer is no. MassHealth P4P Background The MassHealth pay-for-perfrmance P4P program was implemented in 2008.  At first the program was implmented using a P4P structure for pneumonia and pay-for-reporting for surgical infection prevention (SIP) and transitioning to P4P…

Maximizing utility for end-of-life care

Hospitals in Sacramento were concerned about the large number of nusring home transfers to its facility.  Were many of these tranfers unnecessary? Did patients with little chance of recovery benefit from these hospital stays? To reduce end-of-life tranfers to hospitals from nursing homes, 3 Sacramento-area hospital systems and 18 nursing homes instuted the Preparing Residents…

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,…

Do hosiptal CEOs make too much money?

Paul Levy, the president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston made about $1 million dollars in 2005. Of this, $650,000 was base salary, $195,000 was made up of incentive bonus, and the balance was composed of compensation for health insurance, life insurance, and retirement. How do I know these figures? Paul…