Flawed, idealized metrics like life expectancy are often used to report success of a nation or its health delivery apparatus. A new study suggests the lion's share of curbing premature death may not reside there.
CMS
Like educators who "teach for the test," hospitals and health systems are able to quickly learn and adapt to new rules, especially those that come with financial rewards and penalties.
It's time doctors and patients take charge of what goes on in the exam room or at the hospital bedside. Inane, tedious tasks that co-opt such visits are out of touch with real world medical practice.
Does Case Volume Promote Safety While Reducing Access? CMS and Physicians Wrestle With The Trade-Off
Greater patient volumes result in more experience and better outcomes. But for rural and underserved areas, there may not be enough volume to maintain a clinically-safe practice. The trade-off of access and outcome is at the heart of a discussion of TAVR, or Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement, a replacement for open surgery.
How far will behavioral economics go to improve our health and decrease costs?
Enjoy the first installment of a new series entitled The Shackling of the Physician, about inane and laborious diagnostic coding excesses. Bitten by orca? Opera house as place of occurrence of external cause? Pecked by chicken? You have to be kidding ... Can anyone say #physicianburnout?
In the first article of this series we discussed the last of four measures that the Center for Medicare Services uses to establish hospital star ratings — the patient experience — which heavily weighted in determining hospital ratings.
New York hospitals had significantly longer delays than national averages, and the ratings reflect this.
The Centers for Medicare Services released its ratings of our nation’s hospitals last week, which caused considerable consternation among hospitals and academic medical centers. But when you consider its only reporting the average star ratings for New York hospitals based on a star rating that itself is a weighted average of 64 measures, the report doesn't contain a great deal of useful information.
Medicare announced that the program the federal insurance coverage for over-65s will reimburse caregivers for end-of-life planning discussions. Can we just discuss this without falling prey to that old death panel hysteria c. 2009?
Following the release of a preliminary plan by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last November, the agency has officially finalized their decision to cover annual low-dose CT screening for lung cancer.
Organizations including the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommend CT lung screening for high-risk individuals. This group includes about nine million