year: 2016
Four Vital Health Care Leadership Lessons By Carly D. Dunham and Ellen S. Montague
As seen in HFMA Northern CA Chapter Newsletter. It’s a challenge to stay healthy while working in health care, especially given the typical demands of most health care roles. Long hours, stress, limited access to healthy foods and sedentary jobs all conspire to rob health care employees of optimal opportunities to take better care of themselves. Clinicians face an additional level of personal health challenges as they care for those who are ill and injured. That’s why it’s...
Determining PAC Networks with Medicare's New CJR Program By Debra Mathias
As seen in Healthcare Informatics. Hospitals participating in Medicare’s mandatory new Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR) reimbursement model need to develop a high-quality preferred post-acute care (PAC) network to which they can discharge high-risk CJR patients. Hospitals can do so either independently or by using an external consultant. The PAC must, per CMS, have a minimum 3-star rating or reimbursement will be negatively impacted. By developing a PAC preferred provider network based on objective criteria and supported...
Navigate Effectively through Medicare’s CJR Program – An Overview By Debra Mathias
As seen in Healthcare Informatics. Experience is no substitute for expediency. Consider the example of Edward John Smith, Captain of the maiden (and final) voyage of the RMS Titanic in 1912. Despite being one of the world’s most experienced sea captains, Smith failed to change the Titanic’s course or reduce speed, even though he knew his ship was headed straight into a massive iceberg zone. We all know how that story ends. Similarly, despite a massive sea change in health...
Successfully Shifting a Health Care Project Team to Operations
By Cathy Savinsky and Alan Stadelhofer. As seen in Becker's Hospital Review. While common for enterprise health care project teams to shift into more operational roles toward the end of their projects, unless the new operational roles and responsibilities are well-defined, team members risk getting lost in the transition and failing to provide their organizations with proper and needed levels of support. In this article, we share our recommendations for best...
Going Digital to Improve the Provider-Patient Experience By Elyse Ruiz
As seen in Becker’s Health IT & CIO Review. Technology has redefined how people shop for and consume goods and services. In today’s digital era, companies like Amazon, Uber, and Apple have revolutionized how transactions are conducted – at the touch of a button, anywhere and anytime. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, e-commerce in the United States grew by 14.6 percent in 2015, marking the sixth consecutive year that online sales grew...
Improve Clinical Interactions to Increase Patient Engagement and Bottom Line Results
It is easy to picture an internist lamenting his patients’ seeming inability to improve their health by making better lifestyle choices: “If I could just get some of my patients to eat less, exercise more and quit smoking, they’d have a much greater quality of life and need to see me far less.”
Conference Reveals New Provider Perspectives in Patient Engagement By Jim Buckheit
As seen in Becker's Hospital Review. We hear the term “patient engagement” often, but is it really making a difference in terms of patient experience and outcomes? According to a recent NEJM Catalyst Insights Council survey of 340 hospital or health care executives, clinicians and clinical leaders, less than a quarter of their patients were highly engaged in their care decisions and just 9 percent of respondents reported high...
Leveraging Technology to Enhance Population Health Efforts By Chet Stagnaro
How can you cost-effectively and efficiently harness technology to improve your population health efforts? When leveraging technology to enhance population health efforts, use technology solutions that keep patients at the center of your analysis and actions. Here are five technology best practices and five people-centric best practices to help guide your technology-driven population health efforts.
Proper IT Governance Begins with These Best Practices By Mark Jahn
As seen in Managed Healthcare Executive. Leadership, according to the late management expert Warren Bennis, is the capacity to translate vision into reality. While that’s clear in industries and organizations of all types, it’s especially so in IT leadership, which fundamentally works to make an organization’s business visions real. IT leadership begins with the fundamental principles of governance, to help direct and guide an organization. But IT governance can be a challenge for many health care organizations, which...
Nine Best Practices in Healthcare IT Project Management By Mark Jahn
As seen in Managed Healthcare Executive. Complexity comes with IT project management in health care, given the inherent need to balance competing stakeholder interests with limited resources and time. It’s also necessary to factor in the increasing rate of technology changes and external factors, such as health care-specific regulations and the risk of increasing data intrusion threats. That’s why, foundationally, health care organizations must have sound IT project management practices in place to sensibly manage both human and...
ACOs: Implementing and Sustaining Value-Based Change By Bob Wadsworth
As seen in Health Intelligence Network. Just as “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” neither is an efficient, sustainable, and physician-focused accountable care organization (ACO). Instead, expect to embrace a stair-step approach to making the necessary changes in your care delivery and administrative practices. Competency and capability development is always multi-dimensional, so consider these five steps as a benchmark for your organization’s critical thinking on ACO development. Introduction In California, we’re now in what could be termed the “second generation”...