Quality and Safety

There have been myriad articles of late on the costs of healthcare and reform, yet fewer address the costs of quality. In this guest post, Dr. Seymour Handler, pathologist, provides his insight on cost inflation, “the most important problem facing healthcare in the United States.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Thursday it has posted new ratings on 4,000 hospitals on its "Hospital Compare" website, including new mortality and readmission data.

"Much is given by hospitals, more is asked," read the headline in the May 31 Boston Globe. And that pretty much sums it up.

Medicare patients increasingly fall into a "medical necessity" gray area between inpatient admission and observation/outpatient designation.

The once "recession-proof" healthcare industry continues to struggle, with many hospitals laying off workers, health systems enduring investment losses, and states seeing their Medicaid rolls grow.

In early 2006, four years into running my current medical practice, doctokr Family Medicine, I got a call from my medical malpractice carrier.

America's health plans are floundering. If their job has been to provide the nation's mainstream families with access to affordable care (let's leave quality out of it for the moment), they have failed miserably, though they were very profitable along the way, at least until Q1 2008.

At the beginning of the year, Mass. Governor Deval Patrick convened a panel to examine the agreement between Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachsetts and Partners, the umbrella organization of Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to determine whether the relationship was driving up healthcare costs, “making it harder to extend healthcare insurance to all residents.”

CONSHOHOCKEN, PA – Some predictions of rapid growth in healthcare haven’t panned out. But rosy guesses on the growth of convenience care clinics seem to be fully on track. Last mont...