BACKGROUND In The Netherlands, health professionals have created a doctor-driven standardised system to report and analyse adverse outcomes (AO). The aim is to improve healthcare by learning from past experiences. The key elements of this system are (1) an unequivocal definition of an adverse outcome, (2) appropriate contextual information and (3) a three-dimensional hierarchical classification...

Hospital engagement networks (HENs) are part of the largest health care improvement initiative ever undertaken. This article explores whether engagement in improvement activities within a HEN affected quality measures. Data were drawn from 1174 acute care hospitals. A composite quality score was created from 10 targeted topic area measures multiplied by the number of qualifying topics. Scores i...

OBJECTIVES In hospitals, the pharmacy information system (PIS) is usually a sub-system of the hospital information system (HIS). The PIS supports the distribution and management of drugs, shows drug and medical device inventory, and facilitates preparing needed reports. In this study, pharmacy information systems implemented in general teaching hospitals affiliated to medical universities in Te...

When the Health Care Financing Administration implemented the Medicare prospective payment system (PPS), the payment rates for inpatient hospital operating costs were derived on an urban and rural basis within each region. The rates were also adjusted for area wage levels and other factors affecting hospital costs. The effect of PPS on rural hospitals is of widespread interest. This article pro...

A fair picture of adult morbidity can be obtained from sickness-absenteeism rates in various industries, but no such information is available for children. Several analyses have been made of the admissions to children's hospitals (Baber, 1939; Smellie, 1949), and Tisdall, Brown, and Kelly (1930) studied the age of onset, sex distribution, and seasonal incidence of 25 diseases from admissions to...

BACKGROUND Since the early 1990s, specialty hospitals have been continuously increasing in number. A moratorium was passed in 2003 that prohibited physicians' referrals of Medicare patients to newly established specialty hospitals if the physician has ownership stakes in the hospital. Although this moratorium expired in effect in 2007, many are still demanding that the government pass new polic...

OBJECTIVES (1) To determine the proportion of hospitals with and without implementation of electronic health records (EHRs). (2) To examine characteristics of hospitals that report implementation of EHRs partially or completely versus those that report no implementation. (3) To identify hospital characteristics associated with nonimplementation to help devise future policy initiatives. METHOD...

We develop a new methodology for measuring management practices in hospitals, and use this in 182 interviews of physicians and managers in public and private hospitals (covering 61% of English acute trusts). We find our management measure is strongly correlated with hospital performance, both clinical outcomes like survival rates from heart attacks, and general operational and financial outcome...

The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), established by the Affordable Care Act, ties a hospital's payments to its readmission rates--with penalties for hospitals that exceed a national benchmark--to encourage hospitals to reduce avoidable readmissions. This new Commonwealth Fund analysis uses publicly reported 30-day hos­pital readmission rate data to examine whether safety-net hosp...

Background—Racial disparities in acute myocardial infarction treatment may be due to differences in admitting hospitals. Little is known about factors associated with hospital selection for black and white acute myocardial infarction patients. Methods and Results—We identified black and white Medicare beneficiaries with acute myocardial infarction in 63 hospital referral regions with at least 5...