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…
Read More
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.
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
Like many large industries, health care has a lot of transactional activity--mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, buy-outs, etc. These are usually predicated on the creation of significant benefits for the surviving entity.…
Read More
A study in the American Journal of Managed Care looks at the effect on hospital utilization for patients who were care for in one of the country's leading concierge practices.
Read More
A study from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary looks at characteristics of Medicare beneficiaries who disenroll from Medicare Advantage and their spending patterns following…
Read More
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.
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Spotify
Overcast
PocketCasts
Radio Public
Stitcher
Anchor
RSS - Posts