Quality and Safety

I sometimes explain to medical students that they are entering a profession being transformed, like coal to diamonds, under the pressure of a new mandate. "The world is going to push us, relentlessly and without mercy, to deliver the highest quality, safest, most satisfying care at the lowest cost," I'll say gravely, trying to get their attention.

Geographic Medicare costs disparities have more to do with health differences across communities than with inefficient care delivery, according to a new study from the Center for Studying Health System Change.

According to the results of a study published Tuesday in Annals of Emergency Medicine, disabled Medicare patients under age 65 who are unable to take their prescription medications due to cost concerns are more likely to visit the emergency department at least once during the course of a year.

Last week, Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas announced an agreement to pay a $1.4 million settlement to the United States Department of Justice over Medicare and Medicaid fraud allegations.

Hospitals with the highest rates of cardiac arrests tend to have the poorest survival rates for those cases, while hospitals that do the best job of preventing cardiac arrest among their patients tend to be better at saving patients with cardiac arrest, according to new research published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Medicaid coverage alone is no guarantee of improved health outcomes, but researchers found that expanding Medicaid in Oregon reduced depression and eliminated out-of-pocket costs for its low-income enrollees.

Emergency departments are now responsible for half of all inpatient admissions and accounted for nearly all the increases in admissions between 2003 and 2009, according to a new report from Rand Corporation.

With hospitals nationwide feeling the burden of Medicare penalties for avoidable 30-day readmissions, C-suite managers have been frantically searching for ways to pinpoint these high-risk patients early on. A recent analysis suggests a low-cost and simple scorecard that detects one out of four of these patients.

Dr. Thomas Bellavia transformed his traditional medical practice in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., into a so-called medical home where patients are seen by teams of doctors and nurses. He says it has paid off in better, more coordinated care for his patients and healthier income for the nurse practitioners and physicians in his group.

When President Barack Obama released his fiscal year 2014 budget proposal in April, John Lozier, executive director of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council (NHCHC), became immediately concerned that not enough is being done at the federal level to resolve the on-going homelessness epidemic.