Given that between 33% and 96% of medical alerts are ignored, there's little doubt that providers need help in this regard. A good place to start is with a core set of critically important drug/drug interactions (DDIs) that everyone in your healthcare system needs to watch. With that in mind, researcher Shobba Phansalkar, from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, along with colleagues from Harvard, Rand Corp., and UCLA, did an exhaustive review of medication databases to compile a must-have list of severe DDIs. They came up with 15 essential interactions that all your clinicians should probably have access to in a clinical decision support system (CDSS).
As part of the 2010 Obamacare law, hospitals agreed to take a 1 percent cut in reimbursements—about $850 million—which they can earn back if they do a good job. Researchers say the overall amount of money at play is too small to actually change the way hospitals behave. Based on how hospitals currently score on these metrics, most hospitals would break even; they’ll get back enough in bonuses to recover the 1 percent loss, write Dr. Rachel Werner and Dr. R. Adams Dudley in a paper published this week in the journal Health Affairs.
According to a recent study published in Health Affairs, South Carolina has one of the highest rates of Medicaid physician participation, largely tied to its high Medicaid reimbursement rates. Any honest assessment of South Carolina's program would conclude that the state considers Medicaid and our citizens' health an important priority. So when Gov. Haley says South Carolina won't accept the expansion of Medicaid under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, she does so because she believes that its version of expansion will ultimately hurt the poor, hurt South Carolina, and hurt the country by doubling down on a system that already delivers some of the lowest value in the world.
A new model of healthcare delivery—direct primary care—could be déjà vu for some Californians, a retreat to the past when insurance wasn't a part of the health care equation. Direct primary care emphasizes prevention and a reduction in the use of "downstream services"—treating symptoms rather than the problems themselves. The new approach involves monthly payments for primary care—similar to the way insurance covers health care, but without the insurance. Instead of filing claims through an insurer, participants—individuals and employers—pay a monthly membership fee directly to their health care providers.
Safety-net hospitals have long been considered the ugly stepchild of the American healthcare system. The assumption for many patients and doctors has been that the quality of patient care, like the ambience, suffered as a result. And while several early studies comparing patients' outcomes confirmed those suspicions, a recent study published in the journal Health Affairs validates what those who have actually worked in safety-net hospitals have long believed: Just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t assess the quality of a hospital’s care by its decor.
An appeals court Thursday waded into an industry fight about whether the Florida Department of Health properly approved new trauma centers in Pasco, Manatee and Clay counties. The Department of Health and hospitals affiliated with the HCA healthcare chain want the 1st District Court of Appeal to overturn an administrative judge's order that gave them to the go-ahead to open last year. On the other side are hospitals in the Tampa Bay and Jacksonville areas that have long provided trauma care and face additional competition from the new facilities, which are at HCA's Regional Medical Center Bayonet Point in Pasco County, Blake Medical Center in Manatee County and Orange Park Medical Center in Clay County.