All Articles In 'Quality and Patient Safety'
Health Care Spending and Hypertension: The Cost of High Blood Pressure
Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is related to several major chronic diseases. Obesity and diabetes raise your chance of developing high blood pressure, which in turn makes you more likely to suffer from heart disease and [...]
Medicare Payment Reform: Post-Acute Provider Reimbursement
The term “post-acute care” (PAC) covers a range of services patients receive after a hospital stay. Skilled nursing facilities, home health care agencies, long-term care hospitals, and inpatient rehabilitation hospitals all provide post-acute care. PAC providers [...]
Chronic Care Management: CMS Multiple Chronic Conditions Dashboard
Many new care models in both the public and private sector focus on people with chronic diseases, particularly conditions like diabetes, congestive heart failure, and hypertension. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Care Coordination/Home Telehealth (CCHT) pilot program [...]
Patient Engagement to Lower Health Costs and Improve Outcomes
It’s not uncommon for a patient to be confused or overwhelmed by a diagnosis or treatment plan. Complicated medical procedures or decisions can overwhelm patients to the point that they feel that they cannot, or should [...]
Physician Payment Reform: Preparing for Value-Based Reimbursement
Primary care is shifting to payment based on providing higher quality, lower cost health care. New payment models – such as patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) – replace or supplement traditional fee-for-service payments with per-member per-month payments, [...]
Payment Reform Models: Employers Explore Population-Based and Bundled Payment
For the past several years, major payers in U.S. health care have experimented with new payment models that create incentives to control unnecessary health care spending. The traditional fee-for-service model for health insurance does not give [...]
Electronic Health Records: Best Practices in Washington State Save Medicaid Money
Health information technology, care coordination, and cost containment have increasingly become entwined in health care policy. Medicare and Medicaid both have electronic health record (EHR) incentive programs to encourage physicians, hospitals, and other providers to use [...]
22 Proven Patient Safety Strategies
Poor quality of care and preventable medical errors are a major cause of high costs and patient suffering. The opportunities for improvement are considerable. In addition, as states and health plans gear up for Health Insurance [...]
Suicide Prevention for Veterans: Suicide Prevention Efforts by the VHA
The Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in recent months have delivered grim statistics on military and veteran suicides. In a report earlier this year, the VA announced veterans committed suicide [...]
5 Causes of Wasteful Health Care Spending
A painful fact about the U.S. health system is that roughly one third of health costs and spending are wasted. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that wasted health spending [...]
Stay Connected
Managing Editor
