Attitudes of Black American Christian church leaders toward Opioid Use Disorder, overdoses, and harm reduction: a qualitative study.

Introduction: Black American Christian church leaders are trusted community members and can be invaluable leaders and planners, listeners, and counselors for Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) sufferers in the opioid overdose crisis disproportionately affecting the Black community. This qualitative study examines the extent to which the knowledge, attitudes, practices, and beliefs of Black American church leaders support medical and harm reduction interventions for people with OUD.

Methods: A semi-structured interview guide was used to conduct in-depth interviews of 30 Black Rhode Island church leaders recruited by convenience and snowball sampling.

The Association Between Hospital Financial Performance and the Quality of Care - A Scoping Literature Review.

Background: Improving the quality of hospital care is an important policy objective. Hospitals operate under pressure to contain costs and might face challenges related to financial deficits. The objective of this paper was to identify and map the available evidence on the association between hospital financial performance (FP) and quality of care (Q).

Affordable Care Organizations and Bundled Pricing: A New Philosophy of Care.

Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Innovation was chartered to develop new models of health care delivery. The changes meant a drastic need to restructure the health care system. To minimize costs and optimize quality, new laws encourage continuity in health care delivery within an integrated system.

Improving patient flow in the cath lab.

Key steps that led to Kennestone Hospital's success in improving patient flow in the cath lab included: Developing an urgency classification system for patients. Creating a more accurate scheduling system to increase throughput and efficiency. Establishing a project team.

Financial and operational analysis of non-operating room anesthesia: the wrong way versus the right way.

Most financial analysis regarding the cost of non-operating room anesthesia in hospitals is incorrect. This article indicates why this situation exists and suggests how to perform the cost analysis in the right way. It also reviews financial and operational strategies that can result in more efficient scheduling of anesthesia, thereby freeing up anesthesiologist time in the main operating room for non-operating room needs.

Exploring the relationship between inpatient hospital costs and quality of care.

This research explores the potential benefit of improving the clinical quality and reducing the cost of inpatient care using administrative data to inform or restrict provider choice. Cost and quality measures derived from this source are already available to purchasers, payers, and consumers in support of insurance products designed to provide financial incentives for consumers to seek high-quality, low-cost care. It will be important to further refine the clinical and cost data to take into account measurable differences in the severity of illness of patients, and to acknowledge that some of the differences in cost or quality variation among hospitals may not be captured despite such refinements.

Age and laboratory costs for hospitalized medical patients.

Objective: To examine the hypothesis that older hospitalized patients have higher laboratory costs than younger patients in the same severity-adjusted diagnosis-related group (DRG).

Design: We obtained hospital case mix data sets (1995-1997) from the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy. We selected discharge abstracts from 4 medical DRGs, at 5 large academic hospitals (n = 15,265) and 5 midsized community hospitals (n = 10,540), for analysis.