Choosing Your Health Care Agent
Name the best person to direct your medical care if you are unable to do so yourself. When you make a durable power of attorney for health care, the most important decision you will face...
Patient Safety Toolkit
State Restrictions on Health Care Agents
Some states restrict who can serve as your health care agent. Your health care agent is the person that you name in your health care directive to work with your doctors to direct your healthcare...
Watchdog Group Surveys Outpatient Surgery Facilities For Safety and Quality
By Christopher Cheney, HealthLeaders Media, October 29, 2019. For the first time, The Leapfrog Group has collected patient safety and quality information about ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) and hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs). KEY TAKEAWAYS Only...
Leading Medical Specialty Societies Identify 90 Tests and Treatments to Question
Seventeen leading medical specialty societies have identified specific tests, procedures or medication therapies they say are commonly ordered, but which are not always necessary—and could cause undue harm. To date, more than 130 tests and...
10 Best Hospital Cities’ in the US
To identify the “best hospital cities” in the U.S. and the world, cities were compared on 12 metrics that fell into one of the following three categories: quality of care, infrastructure and access. The metrics...
Time For That Colonoscopy? Probe Your Doc First On How The Scopes Are Cleaned
By Emily Bazar, California Healthline. After a colonoscopy two years ago, Patti Damare felt so delirious and weak that she couldn’t stand on her own. That was on a Friday, and she chalked up her… Read More
Hiring a Private Patient or Health Advocate
Price vs. Quality and Value Are Considerations. Do you need to hire a private patient advocate to help with your healthcare? When you are sick or debilitated, it’s impossible to figure out how to get...
Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery Safety Reports by Hospital
Surgeries to repair a heart can be risky, and some deaths and complications are inevitable. Doctors and advocates have pushed to make pediatric heart surgery outcomes more transparent, so institutions would feel pressure to improve...
How to Reduce Your Risk of Falls in the Hospital
Falls are a common and devastating complication of hospital care, particularly in elderly patients. Epidemiologic studies have found that falls occur at a rate of 3–5 per 1000 bed-days, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality estimates that...
Challenging Hospital Discharge Decisions
Hospital stays are difficult times for patients and their families, especially for those who need long term care upon discharge. Increasingly short hospital stays pose a tremendous challenge to families who have to arrange post-hospital...