The HSCRC's recommendations for achieving a full rate year 2017 global budget update include a suggestion that hospitals work with the Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP) to "... exchange information regarding care coordination resources aimed at reducing duplication of resources, ensuring more person-centered approaches, and bringing additional information to bear at the point of care for the benefit of patients."  One way to do that is to upload and share Care Alerts for high-risk Medicare patients. Care alerts are targeted, direct messages intended to assist clinicians in acute-care settings like emergency departments. Several hospitals already create and share such alerts internally, and others have begun to share them more broadly.

 

There are three steps you can take to help your hospital meet this recommendation:

 

If you have questions, email Nicole Stallings at [email protected], or call 410-379-6200.

The third of seven webinars with HSCRC staff to provide hospitals with detailed information on the amendment to the All-Payer Model and on care redesign programs is next week; the schedule for the remain webinars is below. The amendment, approved earlier this month:

 

Under the amendment, the first two care redesign programs are:

 

The remaining webinars are:

 

During each webinar, participants can ask questions of HSCRC, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, MHA, and CRISP. For those who cannot attend, webinar recordings will be posted on the HSCRC website. Click here to find the registration links for each webinar and the recordings of previous webinars. If you have any questions or comments, send an email to [email protected].

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week posted a blog highlighting the challenges surrounding reporting of adverse events related to medical devices and pledging to work with the hospital field and clinicians to improve the reporting system. Based on media reports of adverse events related to some devices, the FDA initiated inspections at 17 hospitals to identify possible breakdowns in the reporting system and start a dialogue on how to improve it. The agency found that some of the inspected hospitals did not submit reports to the FDA for deaths or serious injuries associated with medical devices, and that staff were not always aware of or trained to comply with the FDA's reporting requirements. The FDA requires hospitals to report a suspected medical device-related death to both the FDA and the device manufacturer. Hospitals also must report any medical device-related serious injuries to the device manufacturer, or to the FDA if the manufacturer is unknown. In addition, hospitals must submit annual reports to the FDA by January 1 for the preceding year. A summary of the reporting requirements is here.

 

In addition, the FDA's Office of Health & Constituent Affairs recently released two educational videos on MedWatch. The videos review the purpose of MedWatch, and describe available resources. One video targets a health professional audience, while the other targets a consumer audience. The FDA will solicit input on how to improve its data collection through a public workshop on December 5. It also will seek input on the broader role of hospitals in helping the agency evaluate how well devices work in the clinical setting.

 

What hospitals can do: