Patient Engagement
In one of the first looks at privately insured patients with opioid problems, researchers paint a grim picture: Medical services for people with opioid dependence diagnoses skyrocketed more than 3,000 percent between 2007 and 2014. The study considers a huge cohort of people who have either job-based insurance or buy coverage on their own.
The study, published online by the journal Pediatrics, reviewed the medical records and conducted interviews with clinicians and parents of 305 children who were readmitted within 30 days to Boston Children's Hospital between December 2012 and February 2013. It excluded planned readmissions such as those for chemotherapy.
As a new report showed the vast majority of U.S. states failing when it comes to healthcare price transparency, one expert has said that for states to get on board they must first take a hard look at the websites they are creating to communicate costs.
Their findings are important because, under the health law, services that the task force assigns an "A" or "B" grade must generally be covered by health plans, including Medicare, without charging consumers anything out of pocket.
The federal government released its first overall hospital quality rating on Wednesday, slapping average or below average scores on many of the nation's best-known hospitals while awarding top scores to many unheralded ones.
The new ratings are based on results tied to 64 measures that gauge care, readmissions, patient safety, financial management and imaging.
New Hampshire, Colorado and Maine each received an A due to the increased quality of their reporting and transparency websites.
University Hospitals in Cleveland recently became the first institution in Ohio to treat a patient using proton therapy. Their patient, a 24-year-old woman with rhabdomyosarcoma, was the first in the state to receive such care.
As the push for value-based care demands that hospital executives better align services across the care continuum, hospitals are increasingly appointing chief clinical officers and in many instances the role is becoming clearly distinct from a traditional chief medical officer.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling on doctors to more aggressively screen pregnant women for the Zika virus and to take advantage of new testing technology to improve the diagnosis, follow-up and monitoring of those who have been infected.