Healthcare Headlines Blog

ICD-10 One Year Later: The Terror is Over, the Rewards Yet to Materialize

It's been a year since the big lift of converting the entire claim stream for the healthcare industry to the larger and more granular ICD-10 family of diagnostic and procedural codes. Read More   

Hospitals Add Nearly 7,000 Jobs in September

Employment at the nation's hospitals rose by 0.1% in September to a seasonally adjusted 5,110,200 people, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Read More   

With Room Service and More, Hospitals Borrow From Hotels

At the Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital outside Detroit, patients arrive to uniformed valets and professional greeters. Read More  

Remote Heart Monitoring Can Help Detect Emergencies

Instead of having heart monitors with noisy alarms near patients' beds in the hospital, it might be better to have off-site technicians do the heart monitoring remotely, a recent study suggests. Read More   

Nursing Homes Starting to Offer More Individualized Menus

On a recent Thursday, the staff at Sunny Vista Living Center in Colorado Springs bustled in the kitchen. 

AHRQ Reports Continued Gains in Health Care Quality

Health care quality is improving overall, especially in hospitals, and more people have health care coverage and a usual source of medical care since the Affordable Care Act took effect, according to a new report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Read more.  

AHA Issues Guide for Improving the Patient Experience through the Physical Environment

One way for hospitals to improve patient satisfaction is to focus on their physical environment, according to a new guide by the AHA's Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence initiative and American Society for Healthcare Engineering. Read More   

Hospitals Eye Community Health Workers to Cultivate Patients' Successes

Donnie Missouri, 58, doesn't have medical training. He started his health career in the linens department in Johns Hopkins Hospital. Read More

Number of Seniors Who Need Personal Care Help Increasing, CDC Says

A "significantly" increasing number of adults over age 65 need help with personal care, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Read More      

UCLA Freshmen Learn About Growing Old

April Pearce is in the middle of her freshman year at UCLA, settling into life away from home for the first time. Read More   

Federal Agency Offers $15 Million to Support Aging In Place

In yet another move signaling the federal government's intention to increase home health services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is making $15 million available to test a new model to help seniors age in place. Read More

As Population Ages, Where Are the Geriatricians?

Geriatrics is one of the few medical specialties in the United States that is contracting even as the need increases, ranking at the bottom of the list of specialties that internal medicine residents choose to pursue. Read More   

Location, Location, Location May Impact Hospital Readmission Rates

The socio-economic status of patients in a given community may explain some of the variation in hospital 30-day readmission rates. Read More    

At the Hospital, Better Responses to Those Beeping Alarms

In hospitals, alarms on patient-monitoring devices create a cacophony of noise day and night-beeping, pinging and ringing so often that doctors and nurses ignore them, turn them off or just stop hearing them. Read More   

Terah Hatter can sum up her job in one word – amazing. Her job, she says, “is about caring.”

“It’s an honor to walk beside the patient and family to help them through a difficult time,” says Hatter, LMSW, a social worker for, which is an affiliate of Kindred at Home and an agency that provides home health, hospice and private duty nursing care in Texas.

Advance Directives, or Living Wills, allow you to document your wishes for end-of-life medical care. In the event that you become incapacitated and unable to express your wishes, Living Wills guide your loved ones and medical professionals involved in your care when important decisions about life-sustaining treatment must be made.

Patients are asked if they have Advance Directives when they are admitted to a Kindred facility, said Kathee Paradowski, Clinical Informaticist Consultant in Kindred’s Hospital Division.

“The goal of an Advance Directive is to make sure that patients are making informed decisions and that we’re following their wishes,” Ms. Paradowski said.

Once the patient’s wishes have been determined, the physician writes orders based on the patient’s desires and the Advance Directives are entered into the patient’s record.

What are care management’s best practices at this early stage in its existence? This question was answered by William Mills, MD, Chief Medical Officer for Kindred at Home and Vice President of Medical Affairs for Kindred’s new Division of Care Management, during a break-out session at Kindred’s Fifth Annual Clinical Impact Symposium.

There’s no doubt that readmissions to acute care hospitals are costing the healthcare system a lot of money, and the patients who cost the system the most might fit a profile like this:

Patients like this typically see anywhere from two to ten doctors regularly. They have no home support, so when a crisis arises, 911 is called and the patient is taken to the emergency room, which leads to a hospital stay eight out of ten times, Dr. Mills said. Rehabilitation and a long-term care stay follow, then home care and then the cycle recurs.

For patients like this, wouldn’t it make more sense to deliver care in the home setting?