A blog for and about medical directors
Healthcare workers are more tolerant of violence by patients than almost any other occupations would tolerate violence by customers or clients. In fact, according to OSHA, healthcare workers are more than 4 times more likely to experience workplace violence resulting in days off work than private industry. Patients are the source of workplace injuries (80%), followed […]
In September, CMS released the financial penalties that hospitals will pay for excessively high percentages of readmissions within 30 days of discharge. This is an annual event when hospitals get to find out how much their reimbursement from Medicare will be cut the next year. CMS focuses on 6 diagnoses when calculating the readmission penalty: […]
15,000 physicians responded to the annual Medscape Physician Lifestyle Survey. A component of this survey is in the Medscape National Physician Burnout & Depression Report for 2018. Of these 1,500 physicians, 42% reported being burned out. My own specialty of critical care medicine led the way with 48% reporting burnout. Women were more burned out […]
This time of the year, all across the country, hospitals are creating scorecards of quality metrics for the upcoming year. But what are the economics of those quality metric choices? It turns out each metric has very different financial implications for the hospital and so there are some metrics that are more cost-effective to achieve […]
All across the country, hospital quality departments set goals for the upcoming year. For academic medical centers, that fiscal year is starts July 1st. And every year, at every hospital, those goals are set a little higher and hospital leaders get frustrated when a year from now, those goals are not met. The tactic that […]
Some surgical procedures require a patient to be in what is called “inpatient status” or else Medicare will not pay for the surgery. These are so-called Medicare inpatient only procedures. But Medicare specifies that many other surgeries can only be done as an outpatient, unless there are extenuating circumstances. In my last post, I discussed […]
Medicare and commercial insurance companies love observation status. When a patient has to be hospitalized but only for “less than 2 midnights hospital stay”, then that patient is classified as being in observation status rather than admitted to the hospital. This classification means that the patient is technically an outpatient and not an inpatient and […]
Last week in Kearney, Nebraska, the state patrol seized 120 pounds of fentanyl during a routine traffic stop. Let me put that in perspective. I use fentanyl to sedate patients undergoing bronchoscopy and 120 pounds of fentanyl would be enough to do a half a million bronchoscopies. Fentanyl is about 25-50 times stronger than heroin […]
Quality is expensive. In the United States, we spend about $40,000 per physician just to report on quality measures. That’ $15.4 billion per year. A study by Dr. Catherine MacLean and colleagues found that of the 86 MIPPS/QPP measures (Merit-based Incentive Payment System/Quality Payment Program) that were relevant to general internal medicine, 35% were not valid […]
In medicine, we talk about quality a lot. But most of the time that we are talking about it, we’re really not talking about quality at all. You see, quality means different things to different people and most of the time, we are confusing quality with value. Value = Quality ÷ Cost There are 5 […]