Accountable care organizations have major challenges integrating social services with medical care, including a lack of data on their patients’ social needs and the capabilities of community partners. That’s the finding of a new study published in the journal Health Affairs, based on qualitative data from 22 ACOs. “The ACOs in our sample frequently lacked… Read More »
“Death comes for all of us. It is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Dealing with the fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”– Paul Kalanithi, MD Recently, first-year students of the medical and physician’s assistant classes completed their seventh and final practical exam in clinical anatomy. Through… Read More »
The new healthcare practice of “hotspotting” — in which providers identify very high-cost patients and attempt to reduce their medical spending while improving care — has virtually no impact on patient outcomes or readmission rates, according to a new study led by MIT economists. The finding underscores the challenge of reducing spending on “superutilizers” of… Read More »
Hospitals across England are using 21 separate electronic systems to record patient health care – risking patient safety, researchers suggest. A team at Imperial College say the systems cannot “talk” to each other, making cross-referencing difficult and potentially leading to “errors”. Of 121 million patient interactions, there were 11 million where information from a previous… Read More »
GPs have voted to reduce visits to patients’ homes, saying they “no longer have the capacity” to offer them. Doctors supported the proposal at a meeting of English local medical committees in London on Friday. It means British Medical Association (BMA) representatives will lobby NHS England to stop home visits being a contractual obligation. However,… Read More »
Dive Brief: A new study in JAMA Network Open finds that Medicare patients with heart failure or pneumonia likely had more costs associated with the hospital where they were receiving treatment than their acuity. The researchers randomly studied 1.22 million patients discharged between July 2013 and June 2016, and further isolated them to 1,615 patient… Read More »