The average medical practice spends 785 hours a year on quality measure reporting. That’s equivalent to 98 eight-hour days being used to check boxes and fill out text fields. While 81 days of that work is done by other staff, the remaining 17 falls on physicians to complete.
There’s around 1 million American physicians who’re allowed to write opioid prescriptions, or one out of 320 Americans. However, fewer than 32,000 physicians are allowed to prescribe buprenorphine, which is used to treat opioid addiction.
CMS has begun adopting the preventable quality indicators (PQI) rate into its incentive and penalty program as a way to measure the number of preventable hospital admissions. However, PQI rates only agree with physicians' assessments 10% of the time.
On March 1, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged Olympus Corp. with paying millions of dollars in kickbacks to hospitals and doctors to buy its products. The company, which owns 85% of the U.S. endoscope market, has agreed to pay $646 million to resolve the criminal charges and civil charges...
On February 24, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Robert Califf, MD, as the new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner. The Senate vote in Califf’s favor was 89-4, ending a yearlong debate over his suitability.
There were 1,089 patient suicides logged into the Joint Commission’s Sentinel Event Database between 2010 and 2014; overall, suicides were the 10th leading cause of death in America in 2013, resulting in 41,149 deaths.
How prepared are you for the Joint Commission’s new Patient Safety Systems (PSS) chapter? The most recent PSS chapter came into effect on January 2015 and the Joint Commission will expect you to be up-to-date when they come around for a survey.
On February 19, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that reprocessing instructions for Pentax duodenoscopes had been validated and approved by the agency.
