Emergency Medicine

In his article that advises American Hospital Association member trustees, Rodney Hockman, MD warns that hundreds of hospitals are likely to be penalized by Medicare for patient injuries under the Hospital-Acquired Condition (HAC) Reduction Program starting in October 2014. He points out that each penalized hospital stands to lose nearly $434,000 in Medicare reimbursements on average, with large hospital systems and those with a high volume of Medicare payments potentially facing much greater losses should they provide unsafe care.

Dr. Hochman points to institutions using a bundle of best practices to address this,  including 353-bed White Memorial Hospital, part of the Adventist Health System in Los Angeles, to eliminate two of the serious complications used to determine penalties under Medicare’s HAC Reduction Program: pneumothorax and central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs).  Both conditions are now included on AHRQ’s list of patient safety indicators. 

Promoting patient safety and increasing health care quality have dominated the health care landscape during the last 15 years. Health care regulators and payers are now tying patient safety outcomes and best practices to hospital reimbursement. Many health care leaders are searching for new technologies that not only make health care for patients safer but also reduce overall health care costs. New advances in ultrasonography have made this technology available to health care providers at the patient's bedside.

At Sonosite we are very fortunate to know a large group of doctors and care workers who are invested in global public health.  Those rare people that go to remote locations to treat patients and train the local healthcare workers rely on Sonosite to provide them with the ultrasound equipment necessary.  Through charities, they are often able to provide ultrasound equipment to be left at the location and used by the newly trained staff.

Part 5 of our compelling 6 part series.

Grateful Dad Donates a Sonosite Edge to the Ulss 21 Hospital Legnago, Department of Pediatrics, Italy

Executive Insight
By Diku Mandavia, MD, FACEP, FRCPC

by Nicole Gray

Yahoo! Health, Day in Health
By Lisa Collier Cool

Highly regarded healthcare journalist Lisa Collier Cool covers the risks of sending children straight to CT for scans to investigate potential appendicitis.  She points out that ionizing radiation from CT  poses cancer threats to children and that ultrasound is a viable alternative and could be the first line of imaging for children for certain diagnostic investigations.

Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare
Diku Mandavia, MD, FACEP, FRCPC, Chief Medical Officer at Sonosite, and clinical associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Southern California