Iowa news
UnityPoint Clinic opens new location in Dakota Dunes
UnityPoint Health – Sioux City’s newest health care facility, UnityPoint Clinic – Dakota Dunes, is officially open. The clinic offers comprehensive family medicine services for all ages and stages of life. The new location is part of UnityPoint Health – Sioux City’s commitment to providing high-quality, accessible health care services tailored to the community’s needs. The clinic also looks forward to adding urgent care and foot and ankle surgery clinic services soon. UnityPoint Health plans to host a ribbon cutting and open house for the new clinic in March. (Siouxland Proud)
Iowa Clinic opens South Waukee Clinic and Ambulatory Surgery Center
Last week, the Iowa Clinic hosted a ribbon-cutting for its new 60,000-square-foot multispecialty clinic and surgery center. The South Waukee Clinic and Ambulatory Surgery Center is the Iowa Clinic’s third location in Waukee. The new clinic will house an ambulatory surgery center with a cardiac catheterization laboratory, where orthopedic, foot and ankle surgery, hand surgery, pain management and cardiology specialists will perform procedures. The catheterization laboratory is the first in Iowa in an ambulatory surgery center outside a hospital. The South Waukee Clinic will also house urgent care, pediatrics, family medicine and physical therapy. (Business Record)
Care Initiatives selects Blue Stone Therapy as new rehabilitation services provider
Beginning April 1, Blue Stone Therapy will be the sole provider of rehabilitation services – including physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy – for Care Initiatives’ almost 60 senior care facilities throughout Iowa. Blue Stone specializes in therapy services for older adults and employs over 500 therapists in Iowa. This new relationship provides Care Initiatives, a nonprofit skilled nursing facility operator, access to Blue Stone’s network of therapists in Iowa and specialized rehabilitation programs for seniors. (Business Record)
National news
Health systems want to boost digital health budgets
As economic pressures on health care organizations begin to cool, hospital and health system leaders are looking to dedicate additional resources to initiatives focused on digital transformation, a report from Panda Health found. The digital health company’s results were based on a December 2023 independent survey of 100 hospital leaders conducted by Sage Growth Partners. The survey assessed how hospital and health system leaders are approaching digital transformation. (Panda Health)
C-suites, clinicians are burning out at both ends
C-suite leaders and clinicians often feel they are on opposite sides of an ever-expanding chasm. But they have a lot in common, according to Bruce Cummings and Paul DeChant, M.D. — a former executive and a former practicing physician, respectively, and perhaps an unlikely pair. Executives and physicians are both knowledge workers. Both are trained to spot and solve problems. Both crave the autonomy to fix those problems — but often, neither feel they truly have it. Both are far strides from the bright-eyed, difference-driven graduates they once were. Both are exhausted, and neither knows how to talk about it. (Becker’s Hospital Review)
Managing critical patient feedback in real-time
Whether on inbound and outbound calls, automated voice systems or mobile channels, patients can be heard through a health system’s engagement tools and processes. Complaints and grievances are a huge part of the experience of patients and staff. Hospitals adhere to federal and state laws governing response to medical grievances and must typically respond within seven days. At Standford Healthcare, that information flows across channels – including written letters – and drives patient-relations-team workflows. It has helped make the health system’s complaints and grievances processes more reliable and improved process results for patients and employees. (Healthcare IT News)