Literature Review

Mercy medical record transition heats up in bankruptcy courtThe Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA)December 22, 2023Iowa City, IA—Among the complexities of a Mercy Iowa City bankruptcy sale to the University of Iowa is the transition of its electronic medical system—with any gap or abrupt termination of system operations posing “significant” threat to Mercy and its patients. 

2023’s Most Impactful Hospice Regulatory MovesHospice NewsDecember 12, 2023Program integrity issues that have heated up in the hospice space during the past five years reached a boiling point in 2023. Hospice providers have seen an array of increased regulatory oversight in 2023. That momentum has been fueled by two main concerns among regulators—risks of patient safety and evidence of malfeasance in the space. Hospice News sat down with providers, advocacy groups, legal experts and other stakeholders to uncover the most significant hospice regulatory trends from this year and their anticipated impacts heading into 2024 and beyond. ...Editor's Note: Quoted in the article, Jason Wallace, partner in health care, Barnes & Thornburg LLP; Ben Marcantonio, COO and interim CEO, NHPCO; Carrie Uebel, senior vice president and chief ethics and compliance officer, Compassus

Hospitals Think Some Dead Patients Are AliveBloombergDecember 7, 2023Neil Wenger, a professor of medicine at UCLA, was researching different ways of encouraging patients to make end-of-life care plans when he discovered something troubling—hundreds of patients who were seriously ill, according to the health system’s records, were actually dead. This is a well-known but little-studied phenomenon, according to Wenger—until now. Wenger and his colleagues wrote up their findings in a short paper that was published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. They identified 676 patients from UCLA’s health system that were recorded as alive, but were actually dead, according to state data. At face value, it sounds absurd. But there are many reasons why it might happen, Wenger says. While patients who die in the hospital are automatically recorded as deceased in that system’s database, patients who die at home are not. Same goes for patients who die at another health system with a different electronic records database. “The health system continues to act as if they’re alive,” Wenger says. “If we don’t know they’re dead, we can’t do the right thing.” ... “We think this is a really important finding that needs to be corrected,” Wenger says.