November 19th, 2011 by ChristopherChangMD in Video
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Our office has produced a new video describing “where” snoring comes from determined by a simple procedure known as sedated or sleep endoscopy. At its most basic definition, snoring is noise produced from a vibrating mucosal surface in the upper airway.
Though snoring can be defined simply, the tough question is WHERE are these vibrating mucosal surfaces? Because unless one can define WHERE the snoring is coming from, successful treatment can’t be pursued definitively.
An office exam performed while a patient is awake is suboptimal as the patient is awake… and not snoring. As such, it is an educated guess where the snoring problem is stemming from.
To this end, Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Fauquier ENT Blog*
October 13th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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Hospitals that provide the lowest quality care at the highest cost care for more than twice the proportion of elderly minority and poor patients as the nation’s best performers, researchers found. And patients at the “worst” institutions are more likely than patients elsewhere to die of certain conditions, such as heart attacks and pneumonia.
These hospitals and their patients may be the ones most at risk under new Medicare payment arrangements that could cut payments to hospitals that fail to meet quality metrics, reported researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health.
The researchers examined how quality, costs and patients served correlated among 3,200 hospitals nationwide. They then identified 122 “best” hospitals, those that were in the highest quartile of quality and lowest quartile of risk-adjusted costs, and 178 “worst” hospitals, those in the lowest quartile of quality and the highest quartile of costs.
Hospital quality and performance data were Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*
