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Under a proposed rule from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the nations EDs will see payment rate increases of between 3.2% and 5% for services provided.
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Although purchasing a new computed tomography (CT) scanner and associated software can cost upward of $1 million (used and/or refurbished machines may cost half that), money may not be the biggest obstacle to putting a CT scanner in your ED, say experts.
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Sooner or later, your emergency department will be the site of some type of construction project, whether it is a full-scale renovation or a relatively small repair job. If you think your ED is hectic now, just imagine a bunch of construction workers tearing out walls with sledgehammers and sawing lumber while your physicians and staff try to continue with patient care.
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Jon Huddy, managing principal of FreemanWhite, a Charlotte, NC-based firm that specializes in health care facility design, offers these tips for surviving construction in your ED.
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If you already are working to optimize the care of cardiac patients in your ED, seeking accreditation as a chest pain center can be a good way to draw attention to your efforts, improve capacity, and make sure you maintain those standards over time.
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This is the second of a three-part series covering the top five issues that lead to malpractice claims in the ED and how you can address them. The January 2004 issue of ED Management addressed chest pain, and this months installment involves headache and abdominal pain.
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A dedicated billing analyst for your ED can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars that goes straight to the bottom line instead of just flying out the window, say two managers who have added about $300,000 a year.
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The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) in Irving, TX, has joined more than 40 organizations endorsing a new universal protocol to standardize pre-surgery procedures for verifying the correct patient, the correct procedure, and the correct surgical site.
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We have a hospital 25 miles away that can provide a higher level of critical care for trauma than what we can provide. We recently signed an agreement with them that allows our community-owned ambulance (basic life support) team to call them to dispatch their paramedic squad for an intercept for trauma situations that the ambulance crew feels we cannot handle at our local hospital...
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Emphasizing the importance it places on eliminating easily misinterpreted abbreviations and acronyms from written orders and medical records, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has amended patient safety goals to urge hospitals to achieve 100% compliance by the end of this year.
