Patient Engagement

With research increasingly highlighting the link between sleep and good health, children's hospitals are rethinking just how they work at night.

The experiment begins Wednesday at the VA's operations in Palo Alto, California. Veterans can visit 14 "MinuteClinics" operated by CVS in the San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento, where staff will treat them for conditions such as respiratory infections, order lab tests and prescribe medications, which can be filled at CVS pharmacies. Whether the partnership will spread to other VA locales isn't yet clear.

Five years after a devastating tornado ripped apart Joplin, MO, including its major hospital, a sapling from the 9/11 Survivor Tree was planted Sunday near the healing garden of Mercy Hospital Joplin's cancer center.

With the shortage of primary care providers already severe in some areas of the country, a recent study published in Health Affairs has found that 58 percent of retail clinic cases were new visits, which drove about a $14-per-person annual net increase in spending.

The best way to engage with patients is to knock on a hospital room door, walk in, wash your hands and then sit down and speak with the person in that bed.

Done right and paid right, house calls could prove to be a better way of treating very sick, elderly patients while they can still live at home, feds say.

As hospitals and health systems invest heavily in patient engagement initiatives to deliver a better clinical experience -- and in many cases, to drive revenue -- sometimes just changing how medical professionals interact with patients can have the biggest impact.

During 2014, the first full year of the law's implementation, 91 percent of children who were eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program were enrolled, according to the study by researchers at the Urban Institute. In 2013, that figure was 88.7 percent and only 81.7 percent in 2008.

The study sought to measure whether having access to such a tool, and with it more price information, was associated with a reduction in annual outpatient spending in the first 12 months after the tool was introduced.

Citing "well-intended" but "flawed" public policy that led doctors to treat pain more aggressively, Stack advised physicians to avoid prescribing opioids to patients with non-cancer pain, except in cases where the benefits are expected to outweigh the risks.