More than 60 medical experts and nonprofit organizations signed petitions last week, asking The Joint Commission and CMS for changes in their respective pain management policies. The two petitions, spearheaded by Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP), claim that making physicians...
Preventing the theft of controlled substances at hospitals continues to be an tremendous issue even with increased security measures. Failed drug diversion programs in hospitals have led to record fines and in the midst of heightened scrutiny over drug security, hospitals must improve their...
Facilities with excessively high readmissions can have their Medicare payments docked between 1% to 3%, with 2,601 hospitals penalized in 2015. Two new studies in The Journal of the American Medical Association looked into the issue of preventable hospital readmissions and ways to stop...
CMS recently updated its Clinical Laboratory Amendments (CLIA) for lab work at critical access hospitals and regular hospitals. CMS surveyors will now accept primary source verification (PSV) as proof of laboratory qualification.
In February, an international task force ruled that systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) shouldn’t be used when diagnosing sepsis. However, the CMS sepsis managment bundle still uses a SIRS diagnosis as the trigger to begin sepsis treatment.
Copying and pasting information in electronic health records (EHR) is a common practice that can save busy physicians and other staff valuable time, but it can also introduce significant errors into the record. To help physicians make the most of the copy and paste function while protecting the...
CMS is calling on healthcare providers to team up with Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organizations (QIN-QIO) to support and scaling quality improvement innovations in the industry. The projects include 28 special innovation project awards totaling $8 million in prize money.
To find an inexpensive treatment to this problem, a research team conducted a study of different types of medication on 12,000 patients in 21 countries. The studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked at the use of statins, a type of cholesterol lowering drug, and...
A new study published in The Lancet has found that using antibiotic-impregnated central venous catheters (CVC) can halve the rate of bloodstream infections in children.
Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed banning most powdered gloves in the U.S. While the use of these gloves is on the decline, the risks associated with them for both healthcare workers and patients cannot be corrected through new or updated labeling, according to the...
