Publications RSS

Slower Growth in National Health Care Spending

christina.zimmerman — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:10:20 -0400

Last month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released data showing that total national health spending increased by less than 4 percent in 2009 and 2010, the slowest annual pace in five decades. Writing in the New York Times (“In Hopeful Sign, Health Spending is Flattening Out”), Annie Lowrey discusses factors contributing to this trend. Many experts point to the weak economy as a chief cause.

Pay-for-Performance Programs to Reduce Racial/Ethnic Disparities: Limitations of a One-Size-Fits-All Approach

christina.zimmerman — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:14:38 -0400

Pay-for-performance (P4P) programs are broadly defined as performance-based payment arrangements that are designed to promote improvement in health care quality while reducing costs. Often absent in the equation is the issue of disparities. Racial and ethnic disparities in health care persist, and some believe that P4P programs have the potential to exacerbate such inequities in the quality of care received by minority patients.In an HCFO-funded study, Joel S.

Medicare and Medicaid Spending Variations Are Strongly Linked Within Hospital Regions But Not At Overall State Level

Sarah.Katz — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:07:55 -0400

Proposals to move toward reducing geographic differentials in health care spending have focused on patterns of spending in Medicare. We show in this article that when considering each state as a whole, there is almost no relationship between the level of spending for Medicare beneficiaries and that for other populations. In sharp contrast to these state-level results, there is a strong relationship between Medicare and Medicaid spending in comparing Hospital Referral Regions within each state.

The Value of Employee Wellness Programs

Sarah.Katz — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:49:24 -0400

Recently the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s effort to bring down high health care costs among Chicago city employees.

The Effect of Health Information Technology on Quality in U.S. Hospitals

christina.zimmerman — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:27:25 -0400

Mistakes in the clinical setting are responsible for an estimated $17 billion of direct costs annually to the health care system.Proponents of health information technology (HIT) believe tools like electronic health records (EHRs) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) could help reduce these errors and related costs by improving communication between providers and encouraging the implementation of standard guidelines and decision-support tools.In a HCFO-funded study, Jeffrey McCullough, Ph.D., University of Minnesota, and colleagues measured the quality and cost effects of clinical

State-by-State Compendium of Medical Necessity Regulation

christina.zimmerman — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:28:04 -0400

Medicare Spending, Mortality Rates, and Quality of Care

Sarah.Katz — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:42:56 -0400

We applied instrumental variable analysis to a sample of 388,690 Medicare beneficiaries predicted to be high-cost cases to estimate the effects of medical care use on the relative odds of death or experiencing an avoidable hospitalization in 2006.

Time Is Money: Outpatient Waiting Times and Health Insurance Choices of Elderly Veterans in the United States

Sarah.Katz — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:58:16 -0400

Waiting times are a means to balance supply and demand when prices are fixed at levels that are too low to serve this balancing function. Outside of the United States, patients seeking outpatient care or elective surgery face substantial waiting times for these services. In contrast, the United States, has had relatively short wait times, due to higher health care prices and because a significant fraction of the population lacks health insurance (which reduces demand).

Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE): What Do We Know?

christina.zimmerman — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:29:23 -0400

Interest in reducing costly and dangerous medical mistakes made in hospitals has grown in recent years, especially with new advances in health information technology (HIT). Journalist Ted Burnham, recently noted on the NPR: Health Blog that an estimated one in seven hospital patients will suffer some form of error in their care. Approximately one-third of those are prescription drug related.

Pay-for-Performance Programs to Reduce Racial/Ethnic Disparities: What Might Different Designs Achieve?

Sarah.Katz — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:41:38 -0500

Pay-for-performance (P4P) programs may have unintended effects on racial/ethnic disparities. We used patient-level quality scores from Hospital Quality Alliance and ranked hospitals by overall quality and by racial/ethnic disparities. We then modeled the effects of different P4P designs on national disparity scores. The models using overall quality to rank hospitals resulted in modest reductions in national disparity scores, although these were smaller than the reductions that were found from programs using disparities to rank hospitals.