How do you know which hospitals are doing the best job? Patients, insurers and employers all have a stake in the answer to this question, but up until now factual information on hospital and nursing home performance has been scanty, and what is out there is based on differing criteria.

Hurricane Katrina delivered an excruciating lesson on "information integration in action, not theory," according to Steve Cooper, chief information officer at the American Red Cross.

Sixteen years after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed, workers with mental illness still face a disheartening choice: keep their health problems a secret at work, or risk being shunned, passed over, paid up to one-third less, or even fired, according to a new study conducted by the

Supply expense is the second highest operational cost in hospitals, but traditional healthcare benchmarking doesn't pinpoint factors that contribute to supply-expense performance, nor does it enable hospital supply chain professionals to see how they stack up against similar organizations.

The tentative contract agreement that assigned a role to the United Auto Workers in managing the healthcare costs of its General Motors members was a turning point in the relationship between business and labor — and a sign of things to come in a global economy.

A groundbreaking study has finally put a dollar figure on a previously unanswered question: how much do physicians' practices, due to government regulation, pay to ensure their poorest patients get the right prescription drugs?

A controversial regulation creates a "safe harbor" from antitrust laws for certain aspects of the relationship between suppliers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) in the healthcare industry.

Quint Studer is CEO of the Studer Group, a health care consulting firm and recipient of the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

For government and business, providers and patients, the U.S. health reform legislation promises a new world of costs and care. Most individuals without insurance will be able to get it. Those who have insurance already will probably have to pay more for it.

In the national debate over how to make U.S. health care more efficient, one promising area for reform is often overlooked: supplies.