According to an article published this week in the Baltimore Sun, the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality was recently awarded a $16 million contract that aims to improve surgical care for patients across the United States. The contracts itself will connect doctors at Johns Hopkins Medicine with 750 other U.S. hospitals Continue Reading..
Malpractice laws are designed to provide patients with a legal recourse in the event that they are harmed by a physician providing substandard care. Proponents of these laws also tend to argue that they improve quality of care by providing physicians with an incentive to do their jobs well. But do strict malpractice laws really Continue Reading..
Trips to the hospital can be stressful for patients, and sometimes that stress manifests itself as misplaced hostility towards physicians. We might like to think that doctors are well-equipped to deal with rude, adversarial patients, but a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Florida suggests that rudeness can have devastating effects on Continue Reading..
For people with severe allergies, self-administered epinephrine injectors like the EpiPen can be life-saving devices. Recently, however, the maker of the EpiPen received widespread criticism when it was revealed that the company had increased the price of the epinephrine injectors by more than 400 percent over a period of 12 years. These massive price hikes Continue Reading..
In 2016, nonprofit patient safety organization The Leapfrog Group conducted a nationwide survey of America’s hospitals that graded their safety records based on 30 different metrics including patient injuries, accidents and infections. The hospitals were assigned numerical scores which were later converted into letter grades. In total, more than 2,600 hospitals were graded in the Continue Reading..
Not all hospitals are created equal. Unfortunately, patients don’t always know which hospitals in their area have good reputations, and which ones are regarded less favorably. This can be especially problematic if you’ve just relocated to a new place and aren’t familiar with the local healthcare facilities. Fortunately, Medicare has created a tool to help Continue Reading..
