The widespread use of confidentiality clauses—which limit price transparency and hospitals' ability to shop for devices based on price—and longstanding relationships between physicians and device companies are the two major factors driving costs higher on implantable devices such as artificial knees and hips or cardiovascular stents, which are among the most expensive items hospitals buy. They ...

harmaceutical prices have risen draP l matically in the past 10 years and will I continue to escalate for the next two or three years, Michael Pollard told participants at Managing the Rising Cost of Drugs : A Mult idiscipl inary Approach to Improving Hospital Services, a November 1991 meeting held in Westborough, MA. Pollard, long-time pharmaceutical analyst and partner at the Washington, DC, ...

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) requires disclosure of medical errors related to sentinel events. At the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, we have developed an effective curriculum for teaching third-year medical students this content. The instructional program lasts a half day and consists of large group lectures combined wi...

Any assessment of the impact of required request legislation on organ and tissue procurement must begin by defining required request laws. Of the forty-one states that have passed such laws during the past three years, approximately, half have enacted strong required request policies. These states have mandated that hospital administrators be responsible for insuring that next-of-kin or legal g...

This article discusses management practices that hospital administrators can use to minimize the exposure to property taxation. First, the results of a national survey on the extensiveness of property tax exemption are reviewed. Next, a review of the history of recent developments in Utah is presented, including the recent ruling of the Utah State Supreme Court that "nonprofit" status does not ...

Since October 1, 2012, the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program, established by the Affordable Care Act, has imposed financial penalties on hospitals with high readmission rates for targeted conditions covered by Medicare. This program has led to reductions in readmissions even for conditions that were not initially targeted for such penalties.1 Although this program has almost exclusively ta...

Examining the Federal Trade Commission's retrospective challenge of a hospital merger in Illinois, the author provides an insightful analysis of one of the agency's major antitrust enforcement initiatives in health care in the last several years. Because the case produced several departures from antitrust orthodoxy, these departures may affect the trials of future hospital mergers that are chal...