Quality Of Care

Care Quality from EMS & 911 Left Wanting, Rural Disparities Emerge

February 15, 2024 - The quality of care you get when you call 911 might depend on where you live, with a new analysis of emergency medical service (EMS) systems showing geographic health disparities in clinical quality. The study from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai was published in the journal Prehospital Emergency Care and showed some rural/urban...

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HHS Honors Community Health Centers for Clinical Quality Improvement

by Sara Heath

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) have awarded this year’s round of Gold Health Center Quality Leader digital badges to...

As Patient Safety Improves, Patient Experience Scores Go Down

by Sara Heath

America’s hospitals are starting to rebound after a pandemic-imposed downturn in patient safety performance, particularly in terms of hospital-acquired infections, according to the latest fall...

Patients Skeptical of Nursing Home Care Quality, Patient Experience

by Sara Heath

When it comes to care quality and patient experience, American nursing homes barely pass. In a new poll from West Health and Gallup, patient respondents gave nursing homes just a D+ for the quality of...

How to Use Teamwork to Create a Culture of Patient Safety

by Sara Heath

Mike Seim, MD, the senior vice president and chief quality officer at WellSpan Health, can hardly remember the last time some of the system’s hospitals had central line-associated bloodstream infections or catheter-associated UTIs....

VA Facilities Parallel Non-VA Sites in Care Access, Safety, and Quality

by Sarai Rodriguez

For many years, the Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system has faced criticism for its shortcomings in patient care, including care access, safety, and quality. However, recent studies have shown...

Barriers to Patient-Reported Outcomes Measures for Gender-Affirming Care

by Sara Heath

Gender-affirming care offers a great use case for implementing patient-reported outcomes measures (PROMs), but PROMs for gender-affirming care need a bit of a tune-up before that can fully happen, per...

Are Not-for-Profit Hospice Providers Better for the Family Caregiver Experience?

by Sara Heath

Family caregivers looking for a good hospice experience might want to consider a not-for-profit hospice provider over a for-profit provider, with new data from the RAND Corporation showing that...

Patient Safety Events Occur in a Quarter of Inpatient Hospitalizations

by Sara Heath

Nearly a quarter of the inpatient hospital visits in Massachusetts in 2018 had at least one adverse patient safety event, with quarter of those patient safety issues being preventable, according to new...

Most Patients Wary of End-of-Life Care, Senior Healthcare Experience

by Sara Heath

A meager 4 percent of Americans think the healthcare industry is prepared to manage a growing senior population, with communication about senior care options and patient trust in senior clinical...

Discrimination Shapes Care Access for Patients with Disabilities

by Sarai Rodriguez

Researchers found that patients with disabilities continue to experience unequal care access impacted by provider discrimination and implicit bias, even 30 years after the passage of the Americans with...

What Are HCAHPS Scores, Why Are They Important to Patient Satisfaction?

by Sara Heath

Healthcare is fully embracing the concept of consumerism, and with that comes the need for consumer and patient satisfaction—and reliable ways to measure that experience. Enter HCAHPS, or the Hospital Consumer Assessment of...

US Saw Decade of Patient Safety Improvement Before COVID-19

by Sara Heath

Adverse patient safety events went down in the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out across the United States, marking a key improvement in the overall patient experience that can be replicable...

Ambulatory Service Centers Yield More Positive Patient Experiences

by Sarai Rodriguez

The Leapfrog Group published the first part of its Outpatient Surgical Care report, finding that ambulatory service centers (ASCs) generated more favorable patient experience scores compared to...

How AdventHealth Achieves Optimal Patient Safety, Healthcare Quality

by Sara Heath

For AdventHealth, one of the biggest faith-based health systems in the country, patient safety isn’t just a tick-the-box metric; it’s essential to overall quality and patient experience. In fact, patient safety fits...

A Third of Docs Uninformed of ADA Laws, Health Inequity Requirements

by Sara Heath

Nearly a third of physicians admit they don’t have a great understanding of their legal responsibilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), leaving them liable to both legal...

Phreesia Acquires Insignia Health to Improve Patient Experience

by Sarai Rodriguez

Phreesia has announced the acquisition of Insignia Health to enhance the patient experience, improve health outcomes, and lower the cost of care through patient activation. The acquisition is a part...

What Are Patient Perceptions, Experiences with Value-Based Care?

by Jill McKeon

Value-based care is an unfamiliar concept to most patients, but the majority of surveyed healthcare consumers said they would support a system where providers are paid based on value rather than...

High Quality Type 2 Diabetes Care Requires Care Coordination

by Hannah Nelson

The vast majority of healthcare professionals agree that care coordination and provider collaboration results in higher quality care for patients with type 2 diabetes, but many providers face time as a...

Care Coordination Program Improves Outcomes, Cuts Readmissions

by Hannah Nelson

A care coordination program designed to promote safe and effective hospital discharges is effective in lowering readmissions to nursing homes, resulting in better patient outcomes and higher quality...