A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research explores the relationship between changes in Medicare reimbursement and private health plan provider payments.
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An article in the journal Surgery finds that assessing patients' health literacy before treatment increases patient satisfaction and that only about 20% of patients had adequate health literacy before the assessment and corrective action.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039606013005424Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine examines the link, if any, between hospital readmission rates after surgery and overall hospital quality for surgeries.
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A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that surveillance bias can undermine the validity of certain hospital quality measures.
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A viewpoint in the Journal of the American Medical Association reflects on how valuable shared decision-making can be in reducing medical spending, in light of limited research support for the notion and a limited understanding of how patients express preferences and whether patients really are inclined to choose less intensive treatments. Shared decision-making may be the right thing to do, but may not save money.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1752761According to research in Health Affairs, the formation of accountable care organizations seems to be most closely associated with geographic areas where there are already high levels of provider consolidation and integration, and not with areas of high medical spending, indicating that the opportunity for savings may not be as high as projected.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/32/10/1781.abstractNextCODE Health has raised $15 million to launch a business designed to take information gained from the DeCode projects and turn them into clinically useful diagnostics and treatments.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nextcode-health-launches-operations-with-exclusive-license-to-leverage-decode-genetics-genomics-platform-for-sequence-based-clinical-diagnostics-and-15-million-in-venture-financing-228916071.htmlAccording to research in the New England Journal of Medicine, physicians who own an interest in an integrated, intensity-modulated radiation therapy center, an expensive, highly reimbursed cancer treatment, are much more likely to use the technology on prostate cancer patients.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1201141All the attention focused on the problems with the health insurance exchanges created by the reform law has made for little scrutiny of other aspects of it, which are equally…
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Research published in Health Affairs suggests that the type of insurance a patient has may affect the quality of care they receive in a hospital.
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About this Blog
The Healthy Skeptic is a website about the health care system, and is written by Kevin Roche, who has many years of experience working in the health industry. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements through Roche Consulting, LLC and may be reached at khroche@healthy-skeptic.com.