Hospitals

This network offers interpretation services to patients and providers at eligible public hospitals in California. Trained health care interpreters operate in 16 languages through an automated video/voice call center.

California's 512 acute care hospitals cared for 3 million inpatients and 42 million outpatients in 2007. This report examines these hospitals in terms of their bed supply and capacity, geographic distribution, ownership type, utilization, and financial health.

California's critical access hospitals, which play a crucial role in rural and remote areas, can be strongly affected by market shifts. This research looks at the financial health of these small institutions on a variety of dimensions and identifies strong determinants of financial performance.

Leaders of hospitals with palliative care programs speak candidly about the benefits of palliative care for hospitals, patients, and clinicians. Interviews, brief case studies, and resources provide useful information for hospitals interested in program set-up, financial issues, and quality of care considerations.

Nine innovative programs sharply reduce the need for patients to be readmitted to the hospital shortly after being discharged. This report looks at the issues around reducing readmissions and summarizes lessons learned from the case studies.

This issue brief profiles the extent of freestanding emergency departments and inventories their practices. It also presents an overview of their regulation by federal and state governments, as well as a discussion of the environment for FEDs in California.

Although the total number of emergency departments (EDs) in California hospitals has declined in the past decade, some hospitals have expanded the size of their EDs. This issue brief analyzes trends in the use and capacity of the state's hospital-based EDs.

This issue brief provides an overview of the extent and impact of ambulance diversion in California, and offers strategies for communities that want to reduce or eliminate it.

This online application uses select OSHPD utilization and financial data from 2001 through 2007 to monitor and report on the financial health of California hospitals. Users can generate charts on screen or download complete data sets into Excel. Use of the dashboard requires Adobe Flash Player.

This paper focuses on whether a public hospital's governance structure helps or hinders its ability to respond competitively to changes in the health care environment.

Patient self-service kiosks are being used in hospital ambulatory settings and emergency departments to speed the check-in process, collect co-pays, and perform other tasks. This report discusses the types of kiosks, their capabilities, and best practices in selecting and using them.

CalHospitalCompare.org makes it easy to find and compare hospitals using quality measures. The comprehensive, continually updated information helps patients choose a facility and helps hospitals focus their efforts to improve care.

This issue brief examines California's establishment of minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. It finds that while hospitals increased their use of nurses with the highest skills, the regulation has not resulted in a clear improvement in the quality of patient care.

Meeting upcoming earthquake safety deadlines may be problematic for as much as half of California's at-risk health care infrastructure. Background and options are discussed in this publication, the first in a series for policymakers.

This report, a successor to the 2002 CHCF publication The Nursing Shortage: Can Technology Help?, examines how technologies designed to improve hospital efficiency, patient safety, and quality of care are affecting the work environment for nurses.