The Government Accounting Office performed a more current analysis of the likely budgetary effects of the federal health reform law, finding that its cost containment provisions are unlikely to provide…
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More spending, higher quality? More spending, lower quality? Less spending, higher quality? Less spending, lower quality? Theories and research abound, the latest a study of acute care hospitals in The…
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Can technology be a significant driver of health spending? You betya, look at robotically-assisted surgery. A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that in the…
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There is substantial controversy about the benefits of health information technology and whether those benefits outweigh the costs. A meta-study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association takes…
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An unusually detailed look at one medical specialty is presented in an American Society of Clinical Oncology report which gives a good perspective on issues and trends in clinical oncology.
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Several methods are commonly used to adjust health data for the illness burden of the patients' information that is being used. A new study in the British Medical Journal suggests…
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While hospitalizations have dropped on a per capita basis in recent years, hospital spending remains the single largest bucket of overall health care costs. An Agency for Healthcare Research and…
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The 340B program was designed to allowed non-profit health care providers to obtain prescription medications cheaply in an effort to lower overall costs for poor people. A recent paper suggests…
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Nursing home residents have some of the highest health care costs and often have frequent hospitalizations. An Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality brief looks at characteristics of these hospitalizations.
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Yet another piece of research, this one in the Journal of the American Medical Association, finds finds at best a very weak relationship between readmission rates and mortality.
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Medical spending growth has been relatively quiescent for the last few years. Especially as full implementation of the reform law nears, there is great anxiety about whether that slow growth…
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Telemedicine or telehealth has the potential to bring quality health care resources to patients in an efficient manner, but like many health care innovations, has gotten off to a slower…
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The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System issued a report called "Confronting Costs, Stabilizing U.S. Health Spending While Moving Toward a High Performance Health Care System", which…
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Many large employers may consider shifting more employees to part-time status as a result of the implementation of the reform law, according to a survey by ADP, and they may…
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Most people want to die at home, but few do. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association examines changes in place of death and use of…
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