April 16th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
No Comments »
Chronically-ill Medicare patients spent fewer days in the hospital and received more hospice care in 2007 than they did in 2003, but their intensity of care increased as well, according to a report by the Dartmouth Atlas Project.
While in the hospital less, patients had many more visits from physicians, particularly specialists, and spent more days in intensive care units, as result of growth in intensive care and specialist capacity, the researchers said.
Intensive interventions can lower a patients’ quality of life and cost more, the researchers noted. About one-fourth of all Medicare spending stems from the last year of life, and much of the growth in Medicare spending is the result of the high cost of treating chronic disease, the authors noted. Following patient preferences for end-of-life care may reduce such spending. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*
January 19th, 2011 by GarySchwitzer in Better Health Network, Opinion
No Comments »
That’s the question Dartmouth’s Dr. Gil Welch asks in a column on the CNN website. He reflects on [recent] news about a test in development that might find a single cancer cell among a billion healthy ones — as so many news stories framed it. Welch analyzes:
“But it’s not that simple. The test could just as easily start a cancer epidemic.
…
Most assume there are no downsides to looking for things to be wrong. But the truth is that early diagnosis is a double-edged sword. While it has the potential to help some, it always has a hidden side-effect: overdiagnosis, the detection of abnormalities that are not destined to ever bother people in their lifetime.
Becoming a patient unnecessarily has real human costs. There’s the anxiety of being told you are somehow not healthy. There’s the problem that getting a diagnosis may affect your ability to get health insurance. There are the headaches of renewing prescriptions, scheduling appointments and keeping them. Finally, there are the physical harms of treatments that cannot help (because there is nothing to fix): drug side-effects, surgical complications and even death. Not to mention it can bankrupt you.
Americans don’t need more diagnoses, they need the right diagnoses.
I don’t know whether this test will help some patients. It might, but it will take years to figure that out. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
January 10th, 2011 by Richard Cooper, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion, Research
No Comments »
MedPAC has released another report in which they have tried to explain variation in healthcare utilization among metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), of which there are approximately 400. MSAs more-or-less correspond to Dartmouth’s 306 hospital referral regions (HRRs), and the conclusions reached by the Dartmouth folks and MedPAC tend to correspond. In commenting about MedPAC’s last report, issued in December 2009, I noted that the major variation was caused by high Medicare expenditures in seven southern states, where patients are poorer and sicker and use much more care.
In their new report, MedPAC went a step beyond measuring expenditures, which they adjusted for prices and other factors in their last report, to measuring the actual units of service, a far better way to assess the healthcare system. MedPAC’s new findings on the distribution of service use in MSAs are graphed below:
Based on this new approach, MedPAC concluded: “Although service use varies less than spending, the amount of service provided to beneficiaries still varies substantially. Specifically, service use in higher use areas (90th percentile) is 30 percent greater than in lower use areas (10th percentile); the analogous figure for spending is about 55 percent. What policies should be pursued in light of these findings is beyond the scope of this paper, which is meant only to inform policymakers on the nature and extent of regional variation in Medicare service use. However, we do note that at the extremes, there is nearly a two-fold difference between the MSA with the greatest service use and the MSA with the least.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at PHYSICIANS and HEALTH CARE REFORM Commentaries and Controversies*
December 23rd, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, News, Research
No Comments »
Although medical professionals get used to it, the way laboratory data is presented in reports can be quite confusing to the patient. Typically, it is a few columns of black text with poor organization and little guidance to help the patient discern any meaning.
The folks at Wired agreed, and they brought together some Dartmouth physicians and a group of designers to bring a new look to these drab reports. We got to see their refreshing results at TEDMED, but now these prototype reports have been published online:
Link: The Blood Test Gets a Makeover…
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
January 18th, 2010 by EvanFalchukJD in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
1 Comment »
“We can no longer afford an overall health care system in which the thought is more is always better, because it’s not.” – Peter Orszag
Could anyone disagree? Not really. Which ought to be the first clue that it’s a meaningless truism. I mean, of course more isn’t always better.
But this hasn’t stopped this truism from becoming one of the most popular refrains in health care reform. Most of the time this is directed at one area: end-of-life care. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*
