Six of the nation’s leading healthcare systems will collaborate on outcomes, quality, and costs across eight common conditions or procedures in an effort to share best practices and reduce costs with the entire healthcare system.
Cleveland Clinic, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Denver Health, Geisinger Health System, Intermountain Healthcare, and Mayo Clinic will to share data among their 10 million patients with The Dartmouth Institute, which will analyze the data and report back to the collaborative and the rest of the country, according to a press release.
The collaborative will focus on eight conditions and treatments for which costs have been increasing rapidly and for which there are wide variations in quality and outcomes across the country. The first three conditions to be studies are knee replacement, diabetes, and heart failure. They will be followed by asthma, weight loss surgery, labor and delivery, spine surgery, and depression.
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
Mrs. Happy and I just returned from Disney World for our Happy family vacation. (It was either that or a Parkinson’s Cruise.) While at Disney’s Epcot Center, Mama and Papa Happy discovered what the future of healthcare in America will look like, and it has nothing to do with insurance.
You’ve all seen that giant Epcot ball. Inside that ball is a slow-moving ride that takes you through thousands of years of history. At the end you choose your own future. I present to you this video showing the future of healthcare in America, courtesy of the Epcot Spaceship Earth and Mama and Papa Happy:
A couple words of mention. They still think there will be doctors in the future, unless their reference to doctors was reference to future nurse practitioners known as Dr. Nurse. That’s quite possible. Maybe that’s why the future of healthcare has nothing to do with medical care or insurance and has everything to do with healthy lifestyle. You don’t need to be a nurse for that, you just have to accept the truth of healthy living. And you don’t need a medical school education or even nursing education requirements to make that happen.
Mediation has been cited as a way to lower the cost of litigation and compensate injured patients without going through the ordeal of a trial. In a post from the WSJ Health Blog, the problem is that few doctors are participating.
That’s a problem. A study from a law journal looked at 31 cases that went to mediation and found that,
of those cases, 16 were settled at mediation, 5 settled afterward and 10 weren’t settled. While defense attorneys were less likely to agree to mediation than plaintiff attorneys, lawyers who did participate reported satisfaction with the process, as did “plaintiffs, hospital representatives and insurers,” the study finds.
The authors write that in no cases did physicians participate in the mediation.
Many times, patients resort to suing their physicians simply to find out what happened. In a recent post here, attorney Brian Nash provided perspective from the legal standpoint, and in the comments (now 150+ strong), you can see the dissonance between the malpractice viewpoints of the physician, attorney, and patient. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
Everyone liked him. Though his later years (the only ones in which I knew him) took away his ability to do most things, and though he was in great pain every day, it was easy to see the mischief in his eyes. The subtle humor was still there, coming out of a man who was weak, in pain, dying.
She lived for him. She was always telling me of his pain, frustrated with the fact that he didn’t tell me enough. She was anxious about each complaint of his, wondering if this was the one that would take him away from her. Many of her problems were driven by this anxiety and fears, and she spent many hours in my office giving witness to them through her tears.
As his health failed, I wondered about her future. He was the center of her life, the source of her energy, joy, purpose. How could she manage life without him? How could she, who had so much lived off of the care of this wonderful man, find meaning and purpose in a life without his calming presence?
I’ve been traveling in Europe, including giving a talk at the Salzburg Global Seminar on involving and informing patients in healthcare decisions. In that presentation, I talked about promotion of a newer form of cancer radiation therapy called intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT).
So I want to point out that while I’ve been away the Wall Street Journal published an important piece on this very topic under the headline “A Device to Kill Cancer, Lift Revenue.” An excerpt:
Roughly one in three Medicare beneficiaries diagnosed with prostate cancer today gets a sophisticated form of radiation therapy called IMRT. Eight years ago, virtually no patients received the treatment.
The story behind the sharp rise in the use of IMRT—which stands for intensity-modulated radiation therapy—is about more than just the rapid adoption of a new medical technology. It’s also about financial incentives.
Taking advantage of an exemption in a federal law governing patient referrals, groups of urologists across the country have teamed up with radiation oncologists to capture the lucrative reimbursements IMRT commands from Medicare.
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