With the big push for greener solutions today, Kaiser is holding a contest to seek out design concepts for smaller, greener hospitals. The winner of this contest will win up to $750,000 to further develop this concept.

The Leapfrog Group has named the top hospitals for this decade. Do you know if your hospital is on this list? This survey began back in 2001. It rates hospital performance in the following areas: high-risk procedures and mortality rates; what resources are utilized for patient care, compared to the duration of patients’ stay and what the readmission rates are; how is the staffing and is it sufficient in the ICU and the use of “computerized physician order entry systems.”

The New England Journal of Medicine has published a commentary calling for policies to require informed consent from patients. This informed consent would need to be received before a healthcare professional (who is working under sleep deprivation) provides medical care or performs surgery.

Do patients prefer online connections with their physicians and hospitals?

Representative Gingrey is currently sponsoring a Congressional Bill aimed at drastically cutting medical malpractice awards. He has introduced previous versions of this bill and is a strong advocate against frivolous lawsuits.

How do you get referrals for your practice? Are other physicians referring patients to your practice or are patients finding you through a web search?

What’s your State’s policy on medical malpractice caps? Many students in states without medical malpractice caps are hightailing it out of those states once they graduate. This is the case right now with graduating students from Illinois.

How do you feel about hospitals utilizing robots in the ER? A group of engineers have come up with a solution to alleviate the overloaded triage staff in the ER’s. This solution of utilizing technology in the ER could also shorten ER wait times and lessen the probability of patients’ mortality rates while waiting in the ER.

In Addison, Texas, a physician-owned hospital was built and completed and received their Medicare provider number with only three days to spare before the ban on any new physician-owned hospitals took effect. This is a new Methodist Hospital for Surgery.

Republicans in the House are claiming that they will keep their campaign promises to repeal the health care law. They plan to do this before President Obama’s State of the Union address in January. What happens if their plans fail, Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan claims the GOP Leaders will “go after the bill piece by piece…we will look at these individual pieces to see if we can’t have the thing crumble.”