Best practices and benchmarking in healthcare : a practical journal for clinical and management application
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Best Pract Benchmarking Healthc · Mar 1996
The evolution of change: from nurse auditor to clinical reimbursement specialist.
The nurse auditor's role remains essentially to improve documentation and billing, with the commitment to quality improvement.
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Best Pract Benchmarking Healthc · Jan 1996
The challenge of benchmarking: surgical volume and operative mortality in Veterans Administration Medical Centers.
This study examines the relationship between hospital surgical volume and operative modality rate. Emphasis is placed on the role of referral patterns; the effects of variation in patient condition, operative procedures, and hospital characteristics, and the contribution of volume of related procedures, in addition to specific-procedure volume, the definition of operative mortality, and their influence on surgical outcome. ⋯ This study demonstrates some of the difficulties in assessing surgical results and that we should be skeptical of the intuitively attractive notion that high annual volumes of operations will necessarily result in improved outcomes. This is congruent with recent literature in which there is no broad-based evidence that hospital surgical volume affects operative mortality rate.
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Best Pract Benchmarking Healthc · Jan 1996
Cost containment in cardiac surgery: results with a critical pathway for coronary bypass surgery at the New York hospital-Cornell Medical Center.
A multidisciplinary project was undertaken at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center to develop critical pathways for open-heart surgery to help reduce cost, shorten hospital length of stay (LOS), and streamline patient care. ⋯ The ongoing analysis of cost, LOSs, and outcomes has made possible a process of continuous quality improvement on the cardiothoracic service in which further areas for improvement are identified and studied. The use of a critical pathway for elective coronary artery bypass grafting at our institution significantly reduced hospital LOS and direct costs while maintaining the overall quality of patient care.