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Curbing hospital readmission vital, Connecticut making progress
Recent headlines about high readmission rates forcing 2,200 hospitals nationwide to forfeit Medicare funds for patients who are readmitted to hospitals raises the questions: Can hospital readmission rates be reduced? …
The individual and combined successes of Connecticut health care communities show that improved medical processes, transfer of critical information and standardized education leads to better health care outcomes, and that translates to healthier patients and families, and a health care system that is much more cost-effective.
Reducing preventable hospital readmissions should continue to be a national priority. However, the community care transitions work in Connecticut is a harbinger of hope. We can be proud and optimistic that Connecticut is taking a proactive stance to reduce avoidable hospital readmissions in all communities statewide. This is not a challenge that can be fixed overnight, but real progress has been made.
See on articles.courant.com
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
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Telemedicine to Lower Cost for 5 Health Issues
Telemedicine is the advanced technology that will allow patients to monitor their own health at home.
These devices can upload patient test outcomes to an online database, where their physicians can keep an eye out for dangerous patterns in the patient’s health. The prevalence of telemedicine is slowly increasing and becoming more advanced, leaving the impetus behind improved health with the patient.
Healthcare IT News (2012) recently announced the five areas of healthcare that telemedicine will likely improve greatly over the coming years:
(1) active heart monitoring,
(2) blood pressure,
(3) diabetes,
(4) prescription compliance, and
(5) sleep apnea.
Physicians and product developers hope that telemedicine will be able to improve patient health by increasing continual monitoring and therefore catching problems before symptoms show up.
Telemedicine is also expected to decrease healthcare costs in these areas by eliminating unnecessary doctor visits and preventing bigger health problems earlier.
See report: http://ihealthtran.com/pdf/Telemedicine_iHT2.pdf ;
See on iht2blog.com
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
Mostashari says EHR incentives estimated to reach $20 billion by 2015 | Legal Transcription
There are no set appropriations for how much the federal government can spend on rewarding providers who adopt and use electronic health records under the Medicare and Medicaid meaningful use EHR incentive program, according to National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, M.D.
“Whoever qualifies, gets paid; there’s no hard cap,” said Mostashari, who gave a keynote at the Annual Policy Summit for the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) on Wednesday.
Mostashari said the federal government estimates it will pay out around $20 billion in incentives before the program shifts to a penalty in 2015, but there is no fixed budget set in the HITECH Act that mandated the program. The government recently announced it has paid out nearly $7 billion since the program began in 2011.
See on www.lawscribes.com
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
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