Tomorrow, Friday, April 29th, Jonathan Blum, the Deputy Administrator and Director for the Center of Medicare at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), will join officials from Group Health, Virginia Mason, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), consumers, industry representatives, and other key health care stakeholders to highlight the Partnership for Patients, a new initiative that will help save 60,000 lives by stopping millions of preventable injuries and complications in patient care over the next three years. Group Health Cooperative and Virginia Mason Medical Center both use lean management principals to improve patient experiences and safety and are collaborating to reduce avoidable hospital readmissions through improving care transitions. Continue reading ‘Group Health and Virginia Mason to Join Nationwide Partnership for Patients Initiative’
Monthly Archive for April, 2011
This Saturday, April 30th, the Drug Enforcement Administration is conducting their 2nd National Medication Take-Back event from 10am – 2pm. You will be able to take any of your unwanted and expired medications, including narcotics, to participating law enforcement sites (see www.takebackyourmeds.com to search for participating sites) for disposal. These national take-back events are small but important steps in trying to reduce the misuse and potential abuse of medications. Continue reading ‘Medication disposal event this Saturday’
If you missed Group Health’s first-ever Innovations Conference on March 25, take the next two minutes to check out the highlight video. My colleagues wowed conference guests like State Health Officeer Maxine Hayes, King County Executive Dow Constantine, thought leaders from Puget Sound Health Alliance, and fellow doctors from Polyclinic, PacMed, Franciscan Hospital and dozens of other groups.
Pioneering researcher, professor, and author John E. Wennberg, MD, MPH gave the keynote address on “Tracking Medicine: A Researcher’s Quest to Understand Health Care.”
Group Health created this event as a day of industry learning. It was a chance to share things we do know about transforming delivery systems, and more importantly, to talk about the things we have yet to learn. Continue reading ‘Innovations Conference content now online’
Last week, Congress passed the first official repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in a bipartisan bill that repeals the burdensome tax reporting requirement that has become very unpopular with small businesses. The Senate voted to approve the bill, which had previously been passed by the House last month. Continue reading ‘Reform modifications begin’
In a provocative New Yorker article called “The Truth Wears Off,” science writer Jonah Lehrer describes “the decline effect,” where “results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.” One example: blockbuster “second-generation” antipsychotic drugs, introduced a decade ago, now seem less effective. Continue reading ‘Does scientific truth ‘wear off’?’
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