Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Cancer is a horrible disease. Providing high quality care often means providing safe, effective and cost-effective treatments that meets a patient’s priority. Reaching these goals, however, is particularly challenging when treating older adults with cancer. A paper on this exact topic by Ramsdale et al. (2017) notes that: Cancer care delivery for older adults with…
This question is difficult to answer. In many countries with government provided health care, wait times are long. For the Veterans Affairs (VA) beneficiaries, this does not seem to be much of an issue according to a Penn et al. (2019) study covering wait times between 2014 and 2019: Although wait times in the VA…
In the past few weeks, I discussed how well Hospital Compare does on measuring the quality of hospital care (see here and here). Now, I turn to how well Nursing Home Compare does on truly measuring quality of care. A study by Brauner et al. (2018) attempts to answer this question. They compare the quality…
Pharmacists are often seen as individuals who just dispense drugs. However, pharmacists are increasingly considered as providers that are part of the broader health care team. My own research has shown that pharmacists are a more cost-effective and safe approach to getting vaccinations compared to primary care providers (see Fontanesi et al. 2009). A Health Affairs Entry…
This is basically the question that Perez and Freedman (2018) ask. They find the following: Among crowdsourcing sites’ best‐ranked hospitals, 50–60% were also the best ranked on [Hospital Compare’s] HC’s overall and patient experience ratings; 20% ranked as the worst. Best‐ranked hospitals had significantly better clinical quality scores than worst ranked hospitals, but were not…
How do physicians learn? A paper by Van Gestel, Muller, and Bosmans (2018) claims that the answer is through cumulative experience, economies of scale, or human capital depreciation. Learning from cumulative experience refers to the idea that treating an additional patient generally improves physician (or team) performance. When referring to economies of scale, we capture…
CMS has focused in recent years on payment reform–especially alternative payment models–in Medicare’s fee-for-service (FFS) reimbursement system, but much less has been paid to beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare’s managed care program (i.e., Medicare Advantage). Currently, however, more than 1 in 3 beneficiaries are enrolled in an Medicare Advantage plan, and by 2028 that number could…
CMS has a number of quality initiatives to measure provider quality. For instance, there is the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program, the Home Health Quality Reporting Requirements, the Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) Quality Reporting Program, the Inpatient Rehabilitation Facilities (IRF) Quality Reporting Program (QRP), among others. Have these initiatives led to more patients choosing high value care? …
Although this study about 18 months old, I just came across this and the findings were really surprising. During the office day, physicians spent 27.0% of their total time on direct clinical face time with patients and 49.2% of their time on EHR and desk work. While in the examination room with patients, physicians spent 52.9%…
Not all medical problems can or should be treated by a nurse practitioner (NP). However, may can be. Increasing access to care through NPs can reduce wait times through expanding access and decrease cost. The access and cost issues are not in doubt; the question is, can NPs improve or at least maintain patient care? …