The holiday season is in full swing, as is the time for bad weather, but nothing can deter the delivery of our Potpourri of health stories, including this week the…
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Health care is now full of all kinds of performance measures, and the results are increasingly used for payment-related purposes, raising their potential impact significantly. A new Rand report sponsored…
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Inpatient hospital costs are the largest single category of health care costs and account for much of the last decade's rapid annual rise in health care spending. A statistical brief…
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Another excellent draft report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reviews the evidence related to the effects of bundled payments to providers on quality and costs. The evidence,…
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Disease registries are used to track a number of patients with a common condition to determine factors which affect their outcomes and to help guide their treatment. An article in…
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Another scintillating Potpourri, focused on the effect of copayments on prescription adherence, use of PHRs in the FEHBP plans, doctors use of cancer drugs after a Medicare reimbursement change, visiting…
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An intriguing concept is explored in a paper from Deloitte: would it be possible to move some services typically delivered in a hospital to the patient's home. Based on pilot's…
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Obesity is often fingered as a leading cause of health care spending and health spending growth. It also causes significant personal discomfort to those who are overweight. A pair of…
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The most recent survey by the Center for Studying Health System Change shows not just plateauing, but an actual decline in consumers health information-seeking behavior, across all consumers. It is…
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Both providers and consumers are increasingly subjected to positive and negative inducements to behave in certain ways. An article in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine explores some possible behavioral…
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