Inspector General blasts agency for ignoring ZPIC scrutiny
By
John Hall
Mar 19, 2015
Ignoring a four-year-old warning to more thoroughly evaluate Medicare auditing contractors is among the pile of unheeded advice that could have saved the Medicare program billions of dollars in recent...
Congressional advisors waver on eliminating observation stays
By
Tim Mullaney
Jan 21, 2015
Getting rid of hospital observation stays might not be a good idea after all, according to Medicare Payment Advisory Commission members who previously pushed for the change. Even if observation status...
National Quality Forum supports quality measures in bill to standardize post-acute assessments
By
Tim Mullaney
Jul 23, 2014
The National Quality Forum has come out in strong support of a proposed standardized quality measures, such as skin integrity, across different types of post-acute care settings. Uniform assessments are...
Experts: Push EHR progress even if feds won’t help pay
Aug 01, 2012
Long-term care providers might not be eligible for federal meaningful use incentives for electronic health records. But that does not mean that facilities should ignore these tools, experts stress.
Traditional business models in the skilled nursing care sector are about to undergo massive change, panel...
Mar 10, 2011
Marketplace and policy changes will place unprecedented pressure on providers to diversify and expand how they do business, according to panelists at a skilled care program in Los Angeles.
Working across care settings to improve dementia care
By
Leann Reynolds
Apr 19, 2012
Assisted living facilities, with or without a specialized memory wing, have started teaming up with in-home care companies that offer professional caregivers highly skilled in dementia care.
Ask The Care Expert about … antibiograms
By
Sherrie Dornberger
Jul 06, 2017
We’re starting an antibiotic stewardship program at our facility and I was told that as the head nurse, I should be using our “antibiogram.” I am not familiar with this — can you help?
Ask the treatment expert … about wound drainage
By
Rosalyn Jordan, RN, BSN, MSc, CWOCN, WCC
Sep 01, 2014
While moisture promotes wound healing, what about those wounds that have a lot of drainage?
Hackers steal HIPAA-protected info of 4.5 million people from hospital network
By
Tim Mullaney
Aug 19, 2014
Long-term care and other provider types already have been on the alert for large-scale computer breaches, and their concerns likely will be stoked by news that one of the nation’s largest hospital...
Nursing homes can achieve high quality while gaining cost efficiency, researchers find
By
McKnight's Staff
Mar 25, 2013
Nursing homes in the United States are generally efficient and able to control expenses without sacrificing quality of care, according to a recently released study in the Healthcare Management Review.