More than 80 percent of Medicare providers will face penalties for failing to meet quality thresholds if current performance trends continue, according to a new study. The Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute found Tuesday that fewer than one in five Medicare providers meet the program's Physician Quality Report System (PQRS) standards and are eligible for related bonus payments.
Patients entering church-affiliated nonprofit homes were prescribed drugs roughly as often as those entering profit-making "proprietary" institutions. But patients in proprietary homes received, on average, more than four times the dose of patients at nonprofits. Writing about his colleagues' research in his 1988 book "The Nonprofit Economy," the economist Burton Weisbrod provided a straightforward explanation: "differences in the pursuit of profit." Sedatives are cheap, Mr. Weisbrod noted. "Less expensive than, say, giving special attention to more active patients who need to be kept busy." This behavior was hardly surprising. Hospitals run for profit are also less likely than nonprofit and government-run institutions to offer services like home health care and psychiatric emergency care, which are not as profitable as open-heart surgery.
octors often cave in to patients' requests for brand-name prescription drugs even when generic versions are available, a new study suggests—a tendency that adds billions in costs for patients and the health system. "This is, by definition, a wasteful expense," said the report's lead author, Eric Campbell, from Harvard Medical School in Boston. "Doctors have the professional responsibility not to waste scarce medical resources," he told Reuters Health. "We have to educate doctors and patients about how wasteful this practice is."
The Alliance area in will soon have another hospital. HCA North Texas is building a new $71 million hospital near Interstate-35W and North Tarrant Parkway. Currently ER at Alliance, an existing freestanding emergency room, is the only HCA facility in the area. The yet to be named four-story acute care hospital will be attached to the ER at Alliance building. HCA administrators say the new hospital will meet the growing needs of the rapidly growing Alliance area.
Primary care physicians in underserved New York neighborhoods who received a fair amount of technical assistance were more likely than those who received less or no assistance to use their electronic health records to improve the quality of care, according to a Health Affairs study from Weill Cornell Medical College investigators. The researchers looked at participants in New York's Primary Care Improvement Project (PCIP), a city program that began in 2005 and became a federally funded regional extension center (REC) in 2011. PCIP subsidized the cost of EHRs for physicians in underserved areas of New York. The doctors had to buy an eClinicalWorks EHR that had been modified to emphasize preventive care. PCIP provided technical assistance and coaching on quality improvement.
A nurse who refused to wear a surgical mask after receiving an exemption from a mandatory flu vaccination was fired for violating her hospital's policy. Carla Brock, a board-certified holistic nurse who has worked 11 years at Cox South Hospital here, said she is speaking out because she believes her hospital's new requirement to wear a mask if a staffer opts out of the flu vaccine amounts to a scarlet letter. CoxHealth, which owns four hospitals in southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas, says it simply is putting the patient first.