Inpatient Practice

On Christmas Day, an article was published in JAMA that confirmed what many of us had suspected for a long time. When hospitals are penalized for high 30-day readmission rates, patients are more likely to die. The background is that 30-day readmission rates in U.S. hospitals are disturbingly common and very expensive. In a 2009 […]

I am on this earth because of influenza. This is the 100th year anniversary of the influenza epidemic of 1918 that infected 1/3 of the word’s population and killed 1 out of every 10 people infected. One of those people was my grandmother’s first husband. She was a nurse at a hospital in Durham, North […]

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 […]

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 […]