Coventry gets slapped with a two hundred-million-plus dollar damage award for failing to comply with Louisiana's PPO statute. Ouch that hurts. A vivid example of the need to pay careful…
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Preventive measures can help patients delay or prevent illness or can lead to early detection and usually better outcomes. Unfortunately many patients fail to take even the most basic preventive…
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One approach to lowering health care spending is to lower the costs of doing business for providers. One big item in those costs is malpractice insurance. Cutting malpractice costs could…
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Medicare has an impending value-based purchasing program for hospitals. Payments would be based on performance against quality standards. Some hospitals ability to improve performance may be limited by the economic…
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We light up the sky with a scintillating selection of health care bombshells. Okay, maybe not that great, but some hopefully useful info on the VA's health information system, MRIs…
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A critical component of personalized medicine is various molecular diagnostic tests. AHRQ has issued a lengthy report on the state of these tests, examining their quality and clinical utility.
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The Commonwealth Fund issues one of its regular reports designed to demonstrate how bad the US health system is compared to those of other developed countries. Unfortunately, the report is…
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Where does all that health spending go and what areas are incurring some of the largest increases? An AHRQ statistical brief looks at hospital costs from 2001 and 2007 and…
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A common perception is that there are too many hospital readmissions which could be prevented with better discharge planning. A new study indicates that scheduling follow-up visits may not help…
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Home infusion of therapeutic agents is increasing, especially as more biologics, which tend to need infusion, are approved for use. GAO looked at how Medicare FFS handles home infusion versus…
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Once more into the breach with the Saturday health care roundup, including medication adherence, monitoring patients' health status in their homes, Massachusetts' reform update and insurance costs, hospitals' economic contribution,…
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An FDA lawyer posts an excellent summary of potential issues in regard to FDA's regulation of mobile health devices and services. He suggests that industry adopt a proactive approach of…
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The American Medical Association does an annual survey of claims processing and payment practices by large health plans. The AMA's interpretation of the results needs to be taken with a…
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The Council for American Medical Innovation has released a report about the value of medical innovation to the United States' economy. Concern is expressed about maintaining a vigorous medical product…
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PriceWaterhouseCooper has a Health Research Institute which periodically looks at medical cost trends. Consistent with other recent publications, PWC believes that costs are continuing to increase at a rate well…
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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.
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