Hospitals with readmission rates that exceed the national average are penalized by a reduction in payments across all of their Medicare admissions—not just those which resulted in readmissions. CMS began imposing penalties in FY2013 when the maximum penalty was 1% of the hospital’s base inpatient claims.

On August 31st Health Economist Austin Frakt published an article in in the New York Times “TheUpshot” column suggesting “A New Way to Think About Conflicts of Interest in Medicine”.

The best chart is usually not the newest, most elaborate, or most colorful. In fact, it's often the opposite. You don’t order a medical test for a patient just because you can--don’t just use the sexiest chart available either. So, how do you determine which chart is right for your audience?

The American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) Magnet Recognition Program® honors hospitals for excellence in nursing leadership, clinical practice, innovations, and positive outcomes. The current program has its roots in a ground-breaking study conducted by the American Academy of Nursing over 30 years ago.

Gone are the days of the fee-for-service model. Enter the Value-based Purchasing (VBP) model, where the care you deliver and the patient outcomes you achieve determine the amount of reimbursement the institution or healthcare professional receives. Patient outcomes and safety are the top priorities in healthcare. The challenge every healthcare institution and healthcare professional faces each day is how to provide cost-effective, evidence-based patient care that improves patient outcomes.

For healthcare organizations, retention is critical in achieving patient-centered excellence. When retention suffers, the impact is felt across many hospital strategic priorities. Many organizations create a strategic goal around retention or employee turnover; however, retention matters, not in and of itself, but because of the outcome the goal produces.

Kettering Health Network was facing several challenges, including effectively managing employee competencies, standardizing its education program, improving HCAHPS scores, minimizing training inefficiencies, and improving its accreditation process. Since partnering with HealthStream, Kettering has pursued multiple solutions and, as a result, experienced significant improvements.

A comprehensive nurse preceptor program consists of structures and processes that are tied to two types of outcomes. There are no specific or prescriptive steps for developing a comprehensive program. Every organization will need to look at its culture, resources, and unique needs to determine the exact steps and content of its program. However, some universal guidelines and steps are helpful to consider when building a program from infancy.

This blog post continues our series of HealthStream Coaching's patient experience best practices. Every week we share information from our coaches that demonstrates their expansive understanding of the challenges faced by healthcare organizations and the solutions they have identified for improving the patient experience and patient and business outcomes. This week we examine standards for safety awareness and sense of ownership.

Forrest Health is a regional, multi-specialty system with 3,380 on staff providing care to 19 counties in South Mississippi. In 2011, Forrest General Hospital became the flagship hospital of Forrest Health—a network of hospitals in South Mississippi.

This blog post continues our series of HealthStream Coaching's patient experience best practices. Every week we share information from our coaches that demonstrates their expansive understanding of the challenges faced by healthcare organizations and the solutions they have identified for improving the patient experience and patient and business outcomes. This week we examine standards for elevator etiquette and privacy.

This blog post continues our series of HealthStream Coaching's patient experience best practices. Every week we share information from our coaches that demonstrates their expansive understanding of the challenges faced by healthcare organizations and the solutions they have identified for improving the patient experience and patient and business outcomes. This week we examine standards for commitment to coworkers and customer waiting.

This blog post continues our series of HealthStream Coaching's patient experience best practices. As we look at best practices for using healthcare standards of performance, we will share some specific examples. This week we examine standards for attitude and appearance.

In order for Standards of Performance to become ingrained in a healthcare organization's culture, they must be hardwired so that employees live and breathe them daily. Communication is the key to making a permanent connection between the Standards and the behaviors that most exemplify the culture, serving as the backbone of its success.

As an essential part of an organization’s workforce strategy, the annual employee engagement survey provides organization-wide feedback for an overall view of the health of an organization and the factors influencing business outcomes. Employee engagement is the metric that drives everything else, and when scores rise or fall, other metrics, such as financial or operational performance, and patient satisfaction can climb or dip with it.

This blog post is an excerpt from an article by Gen Guanci, MEd, RN-BC, CCRN, Creative Health Care Management, in the current issue of PX Alert, HealthStream's quarterly e-newsletter devoted to the wide range of challenges, situations, and issues that have an impact on the patient experience. Subscribe to PX Alert.\n\nThere’s no doubt about it: the pursuit of Magnet® designation has a lot more in common with a marathon than it does with a sprint. Here are seven tips for preparing for a Magnet journey.

Doctors, just like all of your staff, deserve and want to be recognized and rewarded for their contributions to the organization. The HealthStream Engagement Institute recommends developing multiple ways to recognize physicians. The following are some suggestions:

This blog post excerpts an article by Danielle R. Coleman, Director of Medical Technologies, HealthStream, in the Fall 2014 issue of HealthStream's PX Advisor, our quarterly magazine focused on improving the patient experience.

The beauty of using the pursuit of Magnet® designation as the framework for your cultural transformation is that it sets out clear parameters for all aspects of the transformation. The very pursuit of Magnet® designation will almost certainly bring your organization a myriad of improvements in nursing excellence, nurse satisfaction, and nurse retention.

We believe that everyone in an organization deserves a chance to be a hero—to make a difference; thus we recommend tiers of recognition and awards. Your award system can be similar or take a different form. Use your own judgment about the culture you want to create. And remember it may take time to make it happen.