Report
Emergency departments account for a rising proportion of hospital admissions and serve increasingly as an advanced diagnostic center for primary care physicians. While often targeted as the most expensive place to get medical care, emergency rooms remain an important safety net for Americans who cannot get care elsewhere.
News Release
Hospital emergency departments play a growing role in the U.S. health care system, accounting for a rising proportion of hospital admissions and serving increasingly as an advanced diagnostic center for primary care physicians.
Research Brief
This brief summarizes a RAND analysis of the role of that hospital emergency departments may come to play in either contributing to or reducing the rising costs of health care.
Commentary
Boston's health care providers reacted the way they did because they knew what they were supposed to do. Those who did not were smart enough to follow the lead of those who did. That's how a “ritualized” disaster plan works.
Journal Article
A team from RAND and the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) developed a toolkit to help hospitals enhance their quality improvement efforts using quality indicators from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Journal Article
Acute kidney injury (AKI) is an independent risk factor for mortality and is responsible for a significant burden of healthcare expenditure, so accurate measurement of its incidence is important.
Report
California health regulators should begin collecting physician identifiers as part of their routine data collection efforts about the services provided at the state's hospitals. Such a move would help providers improve quality by aiding efforts to benchmark performance and reduce variations in the delivery of care.
News Release
California health regulators should begin collecting physician identifiers as part of their routine data collection efforts about the services provided at the state's hospitals. Such a move would help providers improve quality by aiding efforts to benchmark performance and reduce variations in the delivery of care.
Journal Article
The authors design and test a model to predict surge capacity bottlenecks at a large academic medical center in response to a mass-casualty incident (MCI) involving multiple burn victims.
Blog
Former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, a RAND Trustee and Health Advisory Board member, published an open letter to President Obama in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week in which he asks the president to use his executive power to address the problem of medical errors.
Journal Article
The costs of knee and hip replacement in designated centers of excellence do not differ from costs in other hospitals. But hip replacements performed in such centers had lower complication rates. Complication rates for knee replacement did not differ.
Journal Article
Better reporting of outcomes, implementation, adherence, intervention components, and comparison group information is necessary to establish evidence on how hospitals can successfully prevent falls.
Commentary
The problem is that on any given day, disaster preparedness takes a back seat to ongoing operations. The tyranny of the urgent prevents hospital administrators from making investments in preparedness, writes Art Kellermann.
Journal Article
Greater hospital cultural competency may improve overall patient experiences, but may particularly benefit minorities in their interactions with nurses and hospital staff. Such effort may not only serve longstanding goals of reducing racial/ethnic disparities in inpatient experience, but may also contribute to general quality improvement.
Journal Article
Cultural competency has been proposed as an organizational strategy to address racial/ethnic disparities in the health care system; disparities are a long-standing policy challenge whose relevance is only increasing with the increasing population diversity of the US and across the world.
Journal Article
This study provides support for the measurement properties of the HCAHPS Item Set for Addressing Health Literacy.
Journal Article
Fee-for-service vs limited-budget worlds. Efficient care isn't necessarily less expensive care.
Project
Because cancer patients often receive poorly organised and fragmented care, University College Hospital Trust and Macmillan Cancer Support have established a new cancer centre. RAND Europe is evaluating the centre's efforts and developing a sustainable quality improvement environment across the partnership.
Journal Article
Perioperative times were significantly shorter in freestanding ASCs than in hospital-based ASCs. It is unclear how much of the difference was the result of efficiency versus patient selection.
Blog
A patient safety event is any event or action that could lead to a worse outcome for a patient, from bedsores to post-operative respiratory failure.
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