Quality and Safety
Chronically and seriously ill adults who received care from a medical home were less likely to report medical errors, test duplication and other care coordination failures, according to a new international survey from the Commonwealth Fund.
Bundling payments to providers as a means to cut healthcare costs is proving harder to do than originally anticipated, according to a new study from non-profit research organization Rand Corp.
A one-year-old accountable care organization established by Allina Hospitals & Clinic and payer HealthPartners has reported that it reduced medical cost by $6 million in 2010 and reduced the medical cost trend to 3 percent compared with 8 percent in 2009.
As the federal government pours billions of dollars into the healthcare system to encourage the adoption rate of health information technologies, the Institute of Medicine is about to release a report this week raising concerns about the risks associated with electronic health records.
Healthcare costs are in a constant state of expansion yet physicians do not understand how much the care they recommend costs and they are not getting the training they should have so that they will understand those costs and what they can do to responsibly contain them, said Steve Weinberger, MD, executive vice president and CEO of the American College of Physicians, in an opinion piece published in September in the ACP’s Annals of Internal Medicine.
The ad starts off pretty tamely, with an older woman sitting on the edge of examination table in a doctor’s office. Her doctor asks her if she has any questions. She says no.
The Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) enables frail Medicare beneficiaries still in their homes to access medical and social services in the community.
Two mainstays of the Memphis community – the Methodist Le Bonheur hospital system and nearly 400 local churches – have teamed up for a program that helps keep church members healthy while reducing healthcare costs.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announced this week that it has awarded grants totaling more than $34 million in 2011 in the fight against healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).
The U.S. Department of Justice announced last week that medical device company Dfine has agreed to pay the United States $2.39 million to resolve allegations that it paid kickbacks to induce physicians to use its devices for treating spinal fractures.