Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) recently opened a new outpatient surgical suite in the Boston suburb of Danvers and will open a new 28-OR suite on its main Boston campus in 2011. Both suites employ video integration. Here's a look at the projects. 'Building for the Third Century' A new 530,000…

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July 1, 2011, marks the start of hospitals' first performance period under Medicare's new value-based purchasing program. The initial performance period runs through March 31, 2012. The final rule was released April 29, 2011, for the program, which covers hospitals under the inpatient prospective payment system, with some exceptions. Value-based…

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Recognizing how seriously reprocessing flaws can affect patients, the Joint Commission elevated its high-level disinfection standards in 2009, placing them at the same level as the sterilization standards. Under the changes, high-level disinfection is scored as Category A, the same as sterilization, and not as Category C as it was…

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Checklists, time-outs, and other patient safety tools are supposed to make care safer. But what happens when a safety tool alerts a team to a problem that otherwise would have been missed and could harm a patient? Will team members speak up? The vast majority—85%—of nurses in a new study…

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The OR generates more than 40% of a hospital's revenue and between 20% and 30% of its total waste volume, according to Practice Greenhealth, a nonprofit organization dedicated to environmental sustainability in health care. Given those numbers, it's no wonder that being environmentally friendly or "green" doesn't just benefit society—it…

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The government laid out a roadmap for moving toward value-based purchasing (VBP) for ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) in an April 2011 report to Congress. The Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary was required to develop a plan under the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010. The government sees VBP as…

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Tracking surgical site infections (SSI) is not easy for ambulatory surgical centers (ASC). Most patients are gone soon after waking up, but infections may not occur for days, weeks, or, in the case of implants, up to a year or more. Yet tighter infection reporting rules (along with other quality…

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A patient with a multidrug-resistant infection is coming to your OR. That patient will travel from her room—one of the most contaminated areas of the hospital—to surgery, which is perhaps the cleanest. How can her caregivers avoid cross-contamination that could transmit the infection to others? At 219-bed St Patrick Hospital…

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