by Matthew A. Michela
Chief Operating Officer
Care Management International

Outsourcing has become ubiquitous in managed care, in no small part to lowering costs. You can see successful examples in claims processing, customer service, medical transcription and billing services. While outsourcing clearly saves money, it does nothing to provide the substantial value available through smart sourcing, both to managed care organizations and to their customers.

by Rick Litzky
President & CEO
Medical Director Solutions, LLC

In recent years, much attention has been focused on patient safety and adverse event reporting in hospitals as a means to improve overall healthcare quality. Many organizations have been involved with debating, analyzing and trying to determine what acceptable and achievable levels of error and complication in healthcare services might be. Yet, according to its recently revised list of “never events”, the National Quality Forum identifies 28 serious situations that are deemed so egregious that they should never occur.

by Norman Scarborough, M.D.
Medical Director
Premerus

Many of us are familiar with the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) 1999 report, To Err is Human, which revealed that 44,000- 98,000 Americans die annually as the result of medical errors. However, most of the discussions of medical error have centered on the care received in a hospital setting. Significant medical errors can also occur in other patient care settings such as physician’s offices, outpatient surgical centers, imaging centers, nursing homes and retail pharmacies.