Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Richard Haugh.
The number of children and adolescents needing mental health services has surged; yet state mental hospitals are closing and private for-profit psychiatric facilities are getting out of the business. Hospitals that still offer inpatient psychiatric beds are often full, with long waiting lists. So who fills the breach? The hospital emergency department.
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.
The operating room has become a hotbed for hospital technology. Headset-wearing surgeons issue voice commands to adjust lighting, reposition cameras and raise or lower the operating table. Surgical robots on wheels move from one OR to the next. Decision-support tools alert clinicians to the possibility of error.
Mind-bending increases in medical malpractice insurance rates are driving physicians out of certain regions or out of medicine altogether, forcing hospitals to make tough choices such as eliminating services or cutting staff. Hospitals desperate to keep physicians are trying a number of strategies, from banding together to start their own insurance companies to reducing the amount of insurance they require their doctors to carry.
The Food and Drug Administration issued a proposed rule in March requiring bar codes on all medications. Most expect that the technology will be commonplace in hospitals before the FDA's three-year window. A handful of systems are leading the way.
Volume is rising at a healthy pact. Technology is improving patient care. Many organizations have, out of necessity, strengthened business fundamentals, controlled costs and refined their focus. Yet not-for-profit hospitals are squeezed by a cash crunch that has balance sheets under pressure and credit downgrades outpacing upgrades--the result of shrinking investment income, rising pension obligations, low government reimbursement and other threats to operational stability. N&HN looks at the challenges, including recent fallout from the most pressing issues, how some systems have responded, and the pros and cons of borrowing now.
If terrorists attack America's health care info-tech systems, it probably won't be one big blow but rather a series of small incursions that are much more difficult to detect. How can your hospital protect its IT system before and after such insidious attacks.
With overcrowding the single-most difficult issue now confronting emergency departments, innovative hospitals are experimenting with everything from new technology to redeploying staff to redesigning processes and work areas.
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.
A multitude of strains--most beyond the control of health care executives--are converging to create major headaches for hospitals and systems. Skyrocketing insurance premiums, surging drug spending, Medicaid cuts, a staffing crisis and huge hikes in liability insurance rates contribute to the unprecedented confluence of pressures. And there's more.
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?
Physicians are angry, that that's bad news for hospitals. Increasingly, doctors are unable to pay soaring liability insurance premiuyms, are refusing to accept new Medicaid and Medicare patients, and are balking at taking ED calls. What's more, many physicians are setting up niche facilities that compete directly with hospitals in the most lucrative service lines.
As the ax falls on mental health funding, state mental hospitals are closing and investor-owned psychiatric organizations are filing for bankruptcy or shifting their focus to more lucrative general acute care services. That leaves patients--many of them uninsured--with nowhere to seek help except hospital emergency departments.