Editor's Note In partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO), The Joint Commission and The Joint Commission and Joint Commission International (JCI) invite organizations, health professionals, patients, and their advocates to recognize World Patient Safety Day Tuesday, September 17. This year’s theme is “improving diagnosis for patient safety.” This theme…

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Editor's Note The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is expanding its social determinants of health (SDoH) initiatives to include outpatient settings, starting with voluntary reporting in 2025 and moving to mandatory reporting in 2026, MedLearn Publishing August 26 reports. This expansion aims to address gaps in care by…

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What if a surgeon decided to perform a procedure on a patient that was not totally necessary? It happens more often that one might realize. As recently as August 2023, Forbes published an article that cited a Harvard Business Review report stating that over 50% of lumbar spine surgeries are…

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This past February, the OR Business Management Conference, held in Phoenix, Arizona, brought together business managers of all walks of life. The intimate event was once again a symbiotic blend between financial- and business-centric education and high-quality networking. The education offered for seasoned and new business leaders alike, perhaps more…

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Editor's Note Data published February 21 in The BMJ points to air pollution as a factor in increased hospital admissions for major heart diseases.  According to the Global Burden of Disease study, exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) accounts for 7.6% of total mortality and 4.2% of disability-adjusted life years…

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Editor's Note Young Juhn, MD, MPH, professor of pediatrics, research lab director, and clinical investigator at Mayo Clinic, is opening the OR Business Management Conference today by walking attendees through the Mayo Clinic HOUSES (housing-based socioeconomic status) Program. HOUSES was “developed, validated, and implemented…for measuring individual socioeconomic status based on…

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Editor's Note:  Large language models trained to extract patients’ social determinants of health (SDoH) from clinician notes could help to identify patients who need additional support and resources. The findings, from investigators at Mass General Brigham, appeared in the Nature journal Digital Medicine on January 11.  Housing circumstances, employment, access…

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Editor's Note Health record codes that track social, environmental, and economic influences on patient health outcomes are vastly underutilized during screening, according a December 19 EurekAlert! report on research from John Hopkins and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.   Published in Health Affairs Scholar, the study analyzes the…

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Editor's Note Most patients in the US (60%) are comfortable with healthcare organizations sharing their social determinants of health (SDOH) information for treatment purposes, EHR Intelligence October 26 reports. However, the article notes, four in 10 Americans still report hesitation around this data exchange. According to the Health Information National…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission, on July 5, announced that it had updated its Health Care Equity (HCE) Accreditation Standards & Resource Center and its HCE Certification Resource Center to help organizations meet healthcare equity requirements. New resources in the HCE Accreditation Standards & Resource Center include: the feasibility of…

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