A new Rand report explores the use of health information technology to assist consumers in managing their health and making decisions about health care coverage. As health care coverage changes, these tools are more important, but their utility is unproven.
As Medicare pays more and more of the nation’s total health bill, its decisions on what products and services it will reimburse for are more significant for vendors and for the growth of the overall health bill. A new RWJ brief examines that coverage process and recommends changes.
Increased disease prevalence has been hypothesized to be behind much of the growth in health spending. New research published in Health Affairs finds that prevalence growth accounts for little of the rise in spending, with most of it due to increases in treatment cost.
Maryland is unique among the states in having an all-payer hospital rate regulation system. The most recent report on the system’s performance shows that it is continuing to constrain the grow of hospital spending. Payers, hospitals and patients seem happy with the system.
Another wonderful collection of health care research summaries, including a GAO report on likely effects of the MLR rule, physician work intensity, reducing hospital-acquired infections, discharge followup and hospital readmissions, the effect of pay-for-performance on cardiac care and use of EHRs and health history recording.
A Kaiser Family Foundation report surveys state managed care Medicaid programs, finding a surge in utilization of health plans and addition of eligibility categories to the plans. A great variety of features are used in different states, but the trend toward more managed care is clear.
A paper prepared by Mathematica for the New York State Health Foundation discussions readmissions in the state and evaluates proposed methods of reducing those readmissions. Just in New York, billions of dollars could potentially be saved by effective interventions.
Hospitals and other providers have expressed concern that health plan consolidation jeopardizes the adequacy of reimbursement to providers but a new piece of research indicates that hospital consolidation is a much greater threat to attempts to control health spending.
New research provides stronger evidence that using electronic health records may improve quality of care according to some measures more than continuing to use paper medical records, at least for diabetes patients.
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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