If the federal government's new Open Payments website were a consumer product, it would be returned to the manufacturer for a full refund. Open Payments is the government's site for publishing payments made to doctors and teaching hospitals by drug and medical device manufacturers. It includes 4.4 million payments, worth $3.5 billion, to more than half a million doctors and almost 1,360 teaching hospitals. In a news release announcing the site's launch, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the goal is "to help consumers understand the financial relationships between the health care industry, and physicians and teaching hospitals."
Exactly one year after the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov, that tech debacle is a distant memory for many?but the federal Obamacare insurance marketplace is faced with a new set of challenges as the next open-enrollment period is set to start in mid-November. Obamacare advocates say those challenges don't present the kind of dire threat that HealthCare.gov's massive flop did when it launched Oct. 1, 2013. But if they aren't met successfully, it could remind people of the exchange's bad old days last fall. Those issues include what will be first-ever automatic re-enrollment of millions of existing Obamacare customers, the need to build a system that will generate accurate tax forms related to federal subsidies that most enrollees receive, as well as ongoing court challenges that actually threaten to cripple the basis of Obamacare.
The Department of Health and Human Services is improperly hiding health insurers' requested rate increases from the public -- in violation of the Affordable Care Act, according to a new lawsuit from a former administration health official. States are generally charged with reviewing health insurers' proposed rate increases, but HHS conducts reviews for several states that don't have an effective review program. HHS hasn't lived up to its obligation to make the rate filings available before they take effect so the public has a chance to comment on them, according to the lawsuit.
Jeffrey Brenner doesn't believe in blaming a person for showing up at an emergency room for a cold or an ear infection, even if the illness could have been treated in a doctor's office at much lower cost. Instead, he faults the health care system, and he wants to prove that if providers, employers and insurers work together more effectively, that person will stop going to the ER. Brenner, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and executive director of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, is testing this theory with a randomized controlled trial. Findings are due out in 2016.
They're often the first people you see at the doctor's office, and the first line of defense in any ER – but America's nursing population is shrinking fast. The nursing shortage may not be caused just by lack of interest. In many ways, it's caused by lack of capacity. Each year, 80,000 applicants are turned away from nursing schools, often because there aren't enough teachers or resources to accommodate growing student interest. "Suddenly, we turned around and realized we're not attracting enough nurses to go into teaching," said Dr. Kimberly S. Glassman, with patient care services and the chief nursing officer at NYU Langone Medical Center.
The incidence of the potentially deadly bacterial infection known as Clostridium difficile doubled in hospitals between 2001 and 2010, researchers report, and leveled off between 2008 and 2010. C. difficile is a hospital-acquired infection linked to 14,000 deaths a year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the main cause is the overuse of antibiotics. Using hospital discharge data on about 2.2 million people, average age 75, the scientists found that about a third had a principal diagnosis of C. difficile infection. Two thirds had other primary diagnoses. Incidence increased to 8.2 per thousand in 2008, the peak year, from 4.5 per thousand in 2001. It then decreased slightly though 2010.