ICYMI: Trending Healthcare Topics for March 2016
An overview of the changes, trends, and newsmakers from the past month
The first quarter of 2016 comes to a close, and the news is reflecting the drive for effective collaboration and communication in the face of a changing industry—especially as security and safety issues affect key market segments.
Effective Collaboration and Communication
- Collaboration critical for the future of healthcare: Amid a divided healthcare industry, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) issued a rallying cry for more collaboration across the industry to build on the successes of ACA.
- Collaborative staffing offers innovative methods for healthcare orgs: In partnership with our colleagues at API Healthcare, SGP GM Pat Ball explores how healthcare can learn from other industries to solve staffing process woes.
- Measuring success on outcomes demands patient, payer, and provider collaboration: Keeping the lines of communication and understanding open are key factors to the success of the healthcare industry as a whole as payment reform initiatives take root.
- Paying for value: Health Affairs asserts that as value-based programs become more common, more conceptual work, experimentation, and evaluation are needed to insure that paying for value doesn’t wind up meaning paying more overall.
Security and Safety
- MedStar faces major ransomware attack: In what is becoming an unfortunate trend, MedStar has been hit with a major ransomware attack—so bad that it has forced them to turn some patients away for security concerns.
- Misdiagnoses more likely for ‘difficult’ patients: Patients who have high demands and low expectations of their doctors, or who tend to ignore clinical recommendations are 42 percent more likely to get the wrong diagnosis of a complex medical case.
- C.Diff on the rise in teaching hospitals: C.Diff is the most recent hospital-acquired infection to increase infection rates, with the misuse or abuse of antibiotics viewed as a root cause.
- Data security issues plague Healthcare.gov: HHS’ premier public-facing website, Healthcare.gov, has been hit with 316 separate security incidents, raising concerns among legislative accountability watchdogs.