Accrediting Graduate Programs in Healthcare Quality and Safety.

The number of master's degree programs in healthcare quality and safety (HQS) has increased significantly over the past decade. Academic accreditation provides assurance that educational programs are of a high quality and meet the needs of students, employers, and the general public. Under the guidance of the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education, faculty from 9 universities collaborated in the development of criteria and related content domains to be used in the accreditation of graduate programs in HQS.

Lessons learned from implementation of gainsharing.

Gainsharing offers a hospital a way to control costs by using incentive payments to engage physicians in efforts to improve cost and quality performance. Author John Kotter's eight stages of change management can serve as a framework for understanding how the New Jersey Hospital Association and the Greater New York Hospital Association have guided the successful implementation of gainsharing. Successful gainsharing fosters a culture of improvement that capitalizes on the creativity, knowledge, and problem-solving ability of physicians to implement change and create added value.

Pay for Performance: Are Hospitals Becoming More Efficient in Improving Their Patient Experience?

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) changed the way hospitals interact with patients when it implemented a pay-for-performance (P4P) system. Under this system, a financial reward or penalty is based in part on measures of patient experience. The program seeks to reward healthcare providers who expand their focus from solely delivering a highly technical set of services that improves the patient's health to creating an atmosphere that makes hospitalization more humane and respectful of patients' values and preferences.

The impact of price discounts and calorie messaging on beverage consumption: a multi-site field study.

Objectives: To examine the efficacy of alternative approaches for shifting consumers toward zero calorie beverages. We examined the effect of price discounts and novel presentations of calorie information on sales of beverages.

Methods: This prospective interrupted time-series quasi-experiment included three sites in Philadelphia, PA, Evanston, IL, and Detroit, MI.

Maximizing nursing productivity the benefits of improved collaboration between nursing and support services.

Benefits of increased collaboration between nursing and support services personnel--some of which have positive financial implications for hospitals--include: More effective use of nursing resources. Improved patient, nurse, physician, and staff satisfaction. Higher levels of nurse retention.