Today came the announcement that Suzanne Delbanco, founding director of the Leapfrog Group, has assumed the presidency of a company that tracks compliance with safety and quality practices via remote video. Big Brother, meet the Joint Commission. The report, in today’s Modern Healthcare, describes the process this way:Video auditing refers to a ...

Medicare is now reporting actual risk-adjusted mortality rates for pneumonia, MI, and heart failure. The topic must be important, since ''Talk of the Nation'' spent 30 minutes yesterday interviewing Don Berwick and me about it… on the day of Hillary’s speech!To listen to the show, click here. Also, here’s an article from USA Today that got the ...

August 11th was the 2nd anniversary of the epic implosion of George Allen's presidential campaign, the first defeat at the hands of YouTube. Two recent videos of unattended patients dying in ER waiting rooms leave me wondering whether healthcare has also entered the YouTube era.Remember the George Allen fiasco? A 20-year-old Indian-American named ...

Just returning from a work-acation, including a talk in Buenos Aires. Today I’ll briefly cover a few items: Medicare’s final “no pay” list; patient safety in Argentina; a great post on hospital finances; and one of the saddest things I’ve ever experienced.First, the final “no pay” list. I’m not sure if this was CMS’s intent, but their trial ...

Last week’s ABIM Foundation Summer Forum focused on patient-centered care… and who could be against that? But is patient-centered care just a healthcare MacGuffin? What’s a MacGuffin, you ask? In a spectacular talk at the Forum, Michael Richardson of Chicago’s Hines VA reminded us that the MacGuffin was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite ...

In today’s Annals of Internal Medicine, my colleagues and I describe the saga of the four-hour measure of door-to-antibiotics time for pneumonia – the first truly dangerous measure in the era of public quality reporting. It is an important cautionary tale. As I’ve discussed previously, the biggest surprise of the last decade in the quality field ...

The Joint Commission just released its 2009 National Patient Safety Goals, and – no surprise – they focus on infection prevention. While this seems natural today, it wasn’t always so. In fact, the conflation of infection control and patient safety is one of the most surprising twists of the patient safety revolution. The inclusion – make that ...

Last week, Medicare proposed nine additional “do not pay” conditions, several months before implementing the first eight. I like the concept of not paying for preventable adverse events, but this new list is a case of too far, too fast.In my previous review of the new policy (here and in this article), I described four conditions that should be ...

Last week, Medicare added patient satisfaction data to its hospital reporting website. This is progress, but it raises an interesting question: should patient satisfaction scores be case-mix adjusted?The motivation to include patient satisfaction data comes from the Institute of Medicine’s inclusion of “patient-centeredness” as one key component ...

Do you get as annoyed as I do about being pressured on your “Time of Discharge?” I just received my monthly report, and we’re in The Doghouse again: our average TOD – 3:28 pm – is hours after “check-out time.” But when did we turn into the Holiday Inn?Let’s start by appreciating where this comes from. Many hospitals, including mine, tend to run ...