For Dr. Elaine Goodman, the strongest lessons in patient safety didn't come from her training. They came from her mother's death. Goodman had just finished her first year of medical school when she found herself spending months at the bedside of her 63-year-old mom, who was battling breast cancer in the hospital. Goodman shared her story after completing ProPublica's Provider Questionnaire, part of their ongoing reporting on patient safety.
A former Obama administration official whose nomination to a powerful health care post was derailed by Senate Republicans said Tuesday that he is strongly considering a run for governor in 2014. If he decides to run, Dr. Donald M. Berwick would follow a path charted by Elizabeth Warren, who began her term as senator this week, two years after her nomination to lead a federal consumer protection agency was shelved amid Republican opposition. Berwick ran the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and is one of the nation's leading experts on health cost and quality. Obama installed him using a recess appointment in 2010, but Berwick resigned in late 2011 when Republicans made clear they would strongly oppose his confirmation.
Republicans' newest attempt at blocking Obamacare is not another Supreme Court case. It's not a full piece of legislation. Instead, it is a two-line item quietly tucked into a rules bill passed last week (and astutely noticed by the Hill's Sam Baker). The provision, in full, is this: "Independent Payment Advisory Board- Section 1899A(d) of the Social Security Act shall not apply in the One Hundred Thirteenth Congress." Did the House just abolish a health-care board in the swoop of 20 words? Not exactly: What this provision does, essentially, is change the ground rules for debating any cost-cutting recommendations from the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB.
Screening women for breast cancer costs the U.S. Medicare program $1 billion every year - about as much as it spends on treatment, according to a new study. "It's known that we're spending over $1 billion on treating cancer, but we were surprised to find that we're also spending over $1 billion for screening," said Dr. Cary Gross, the study's lead author from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Health information technology won't create the kind of cost savings predicted in a 2005 RAND Corp. study until the technology is far more widespread and is used to its full potential, a pair of RAND researchers conclude in a new Health Affairs report. The earlier RAND report, authored by Richard Hillestad and his colleagues, predicted that the potential efficiency and safety improvements made possible by health IT could save the U.S. healthcare system $81 billion a year. Since 2005, annual health spending has soared from $2 billion to $2.8 trillion, yet quality and efficiency have improved only marginally, despite an increase in health IT adoption, note researchers Arthur L. Kellerman and Spencer S. Jones in the new paper.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo will announce in his State of the State Message this week that every hospital in New York must adopt aggressive procedures for identifying sepsis in patients, including the use of a countdown clock to begin treatment within an hour of spotting it, a state official said. The new steps could save 5,000 to 8,000 lives annually, state health officials say, and reduce the long-term costs of the condition.