Another recent study has exposed the limitations of the current quality indicators used by Medicare and many insurance companies. This time it’s for in-hospital patient deaths. Researchers looked at the mortality rate for patients admitted for pneumonia to 303 California hospitals. Hospitals were lumped into groups of performance using the standard quality measures....
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I imagine many of you have heard about the fantastic article in Time magazine called Bitter Pill, written by Steven Brill at: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/ In a nutshell, it exposes the absurd system of chargemasters and bills the hospitals use to obfuscate their prices. It exposes the unconscionable reality that the uninsured, who...
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I’m back from the big annual TAFP meeting, and once again my colleagues tell me stories of crazy practices in the private sector. Here is one from a doctor in Plano. A 27-year-old male patient of his went to the ER with chest pain. The EKG showed early repolarization and the...
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I’ve seen a few commentaries that suggest healthcare inflation is slowing. There are different opinions about the root causes – merely a consequence of the general economic slowdown vs. a true change in utilization patterns. Two recent reports suggest that costs healthcare inflation is not really slowing and is still greater...
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Last week I wrote about the comparison between the average hospital costs of U.S. hospitals compared to other developed countries. The bottom line is that U.S. hospital average length of stay and total hospital days per adult per year compare very favorably to the rest of the world. But the cost...
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A recent study in Annals of Internal Medicine looked at what happened when patients were cared for in the hospital by private physicians (presumably often their personal physicians) compared to hospitalists. For a little background, hospitalists are doctors whose job is limited to taking care of patients in the hospital. They...
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One of the approaches some corporations are taking to hold down health care costs is to put more responsibility on their employees through high-deductible health insurance plans. It makes sense that they would try this. After all, this reflects the daily life of the business community as they compete for consumers...
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