A new report from the Commonwealth Fund tracks performance of local health care systems across the United States, finding as much as a two to three times variation across the 306 regions, as measured on several dimensions of access and quality.
Spring is in the air but take a few minutes to refresh with our latest Potpourri, which includes the Congressional Budget Office’s latest health reform projections, ER use by those with Medicaid or private insurance coverage, the effect of selective outcomes reporting in research, an AonHewitt survey of employers on exchange use, another CBO report on employer incentives for use of TriCare and physician costs to comply with quality mandates.
A review article in the American Journal of Managed Care summarizes the evidence to date on medical homes. The results look modestly promising, with evidence of improving quality of care, some signs of cost control, but other evidence that suggests net cost increases.
A crucial question in the next few years is what will happen with employer-sponsored health care coverage in the wake of the reform law’s full implementation. A new survey from Willis reports on some current attitudes and actions among companies in regard to health plan options.
We would all like to believe that spending more on health care means we would have better outcomes and healthier people. Most research on the topic to date has suggested that this is not true, but a new study from Canada indicates that perhaps spending more is associated with better treatment outcomes.
Can all the public reporting on provider quality and cost performance actually be used by consumers to make good choices for their health care services? That is the question explored in a Health Affairs study and the research gives a positive answer.
A new study published in Health Affairs looks at one of the claimed benefits for broader use of health information technology, that it will reduce redundant test ordering, and finds that it appears to have the opposite effect. Once again, it pays to be very leery about the remedial claims of all these great new health care advances.
Years after it was initially predicted to do so, medical care based on individual genetic findings is becoming more pervasive. A new report from UnitedHealth Group examines trends and impacts over the next few years from this more personalized version of medicine.
With the advent of the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services hospital readmission penalty program, hospitals are scrambling to try to identify potential readmissions and manage them. A new Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality report gives some basic data on hospital readmissions for chronic and acute conditions.
Specialty drug costs are growing very rapidly and in a few years may constitute half of all pharmaceutical spending. A new report from the Pharmacy Benefit Management Institute highlights trends in utilization and costs in this health care category.
Another outstanding collection of summaries from the health research literature, including this week, physicians’ difficulty in understanding the benefits of screening tests, physicians’ feelings about health information technology, AARP’s latest report on prices paid by seniors for commonly used drugs, the real cost of health reform, variation in outcomes and costs of knee replacements and shared decision-making in two common clinical situations.
One of the causes of rapid health spending growth is the aging of our population. A new report from the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality reviews the literature on home and community-based care for the elderly versus institutional care in nursing homes.
A report from the International Federation of Health Plans compares prices for some common services and drugs across several developed countries. In all categories, physician services, hospital care and drugs, the United States pays average commercial plan prices that are much higher than any other country for almost every service.
Wellness programs are popular among employers and payers because of a perception that they can reduce health care spending, at least in the long run. A new study published in the Population Health Management journal tests whether such programs can lead to an enhanced sense of overall well-being among particpants.
A small percent of the population accounts for a large percent of overall health spending. These people have often had difficulty getting health insurance and the reform law fixes that, but at a cost which is apparently far higher than what was originally projected by the Administration, according to its own analysis.
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 [email protected].
© 2024 Healthy Skeptic.
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