Medical care provided near the end of a patient's life accounts for a significant portion of total national health spending and is often inconsistent with patient wishes. New research evaluates…
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Sitting indoors seeking relief from the summer heat? Here's a montage of cool and refreshing health care items, including CPOE systems, accountable care organizations, Massachusetts' reform experience, reducing imaging, and…
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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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