Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Dagmara Scalise.
This month's gatefold examines how physicians view and use information technology, the reasons for physician resistance to IT and strategies that hospital leaders use to overcome that resistance and incorporate IT into their organizations.
Welcome to the age of transparency. Spurred by an unprecedented convergence of forces, dissemination of hospital performance data is at the forefront of the quality movement. Thanks to an initiative led by the AHA and other groups, hospitals have the opportunity to define quality and decide how it will be measured and reported. Will they?
Case studies of four hospitals show how Six Sigma can be used for everything from reducing ED hold time to cutting down on medical errors. Our examples pinpoint the costs of implementation and the savings and other benefits derived.
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International trade and travel have rendered political and geographic boundaries irrelevant when it comes to diseases. HIV and SARS are among the more recent examples of deadly viruses that spread swiftly from one continent to the next before international health experts can identify them, much less begin to search for a cure. This snapshot of global health issues looks at payer systems from a cross section of nations, lists the world's eight most infectious diseases and their rate of incidence by region, and pays special attention to the shortage of health care workers, which has reached crisis proportions in many areas and is pitting nation against nation in the competition for qualified staff.
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Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
As U.S. medical care relies more heavily on prescription drugs, hospitals are caught in an increasingly painful situation. Shortages of critical pharmaceuticals often leave hospitals empty-handed and, according to clinicians, endanger patient safety. Soaring drug costs account for a huge proportion of burgeoning health care spending, and strategies to control costs, including pharmacy benefit managers and drug discount cards for seniors, so far have had limited or negligible success. Direct-to-consumer advertising has increased demand for expensive--and according to some experts, unnecessary or inappropriate--prescription drugs. In this special report H&HN examines the pressures that these factors put on hospitals.
Cardiovascular services are one of the few remaining profit centers for hospitals, and as baby boomers age, the need for such care is skyrocketing. A good cardiology program enhances a hospital's reputation and patient volume. However, the pressures to expand and the cost of swiftly changing technology put hospitals that are trying to keep up in a tight squeeze, which raises the question: is the pulse of change in cardiology too rapid?
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Along with tight reimbursement and confounding regulations, any list of big headaches for health care leaders includes information technology. We've been promised so much from IT for so long, and have been disappointed so many times, who can blame us for being skeptical, if not downright cynical? When is the last time an investment in information technology actually improved your bottom line? But we know we can't dismiss IT altogether. At the end of the rainbow there really is efficiency, security and better care for patients. So how close are we? In this issue, H&HN takes a hard look at technology--what it can do for us today and tomorrow. We look at return on investment, examining whether hospitals are measuring what they get back against what they put in; a budding effort to bring a common platform to health care IT; handheld computers; electronic medical records; and computerized physician order entry. The technology is out there, but it's fair to ask: is it really clicking yet?
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