Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

What Patients Are The Lowest Quality Hospitals Serving?

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*

Research Shows Decrease In Time From Hospital Arrival To Heart Attack Treatment

Heart attack patients are now being treated on average 32 minutes faster than they were five years ago, and medical societies are touting it as evidence of the success of national campaigns to treat heart attacks more quickly.

The study, “Improvements in Door-to-Balloon Time in the United States: 2005-2010,” found that the average time from hospital arrival to treatment declined from 96 minutes in 2005 to just 64 minutes in 2010. In addition, more than 90% of heart attack patients who required emergency angioplasty in 2010 received treatment within the recommended 90 minutes, up from 44% in 2005.

Also, the study reported that Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*

How To Tell If Your Doctor Is Talented At Endoscopy

I have noticed that we all think we are the best endoscopist around (in my case, that is indeed true!). However, we really never measured colonoscopy skill as a “patient-centered” metric and instead often use speed, efficiency, sedation needs, etc. when judging our colleagues. What is more important than these measures, however, is whether we find and remove adenomas, thereby preventing colon cancer downstream in our patients.

A number of surrogate markers for quality colonoscopy and polyp detection have been used in the past, including scope-withdrawal time from the cecum. But the one measure that has been the best predictor of quality is an endoscopist’s ADR (adenoma detection rate). In fact, this is the most reliable quality measure yet determined, and it may become the basis for being paid for these procedures in the not so distant future.

So I need to ask you:

1)      Do you know your ADR?

2)      Do you or does your group compare your ADR to other endoscopists within your endoscopy unit or practice?

3)      Is there a program to increase ADR in low performers in your endoscopy unit?

4)      Do you use your ADR as a marketing tool?

5)      What is your take on the ADR as a quality measure?

I look forward to hearing from you on this topic!

*This blog post was originally published at Gut Check on Gastroenterology*

More Bureaucracy: Quality Healthcare Measured With Check Boxes

With the news that Wellpoint, one of the largest insurance companies in America, will cut off annual 8% payment increases to about 1,500 hospitals if they fail to “test” high enough on 51 quality measures, they have officially defined “quality” health care as checkboxes.

Yep, checkboxes.

You see how do insurers know if we offer each of our patient’s nutritional guidance or exercise counseling?

Well, they check to see of doctors have clicked on a yellow warning box advising we do this. If we have, then not only is that doctor a fine, “quality” doctor, but the hospitals (and it’s computer system and scores of administrative staff that compile and submit this data) are real, fine, “quality” hospitals.

That’s all there is to it.

Never mind if we don’t have time to actually perform the counseling.

* click * * check * * click *

Simple as pie. Efficient, too.

Beautiful bureaucratic quality.

Good luck with that.

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*

The Problem With The Newly-Launched “Healthcare.gov”

If a website touted misleading healthcare information, you’d hope the government would do something about it. But what do you do when the government is the one feeding the public bad information?

Last week the Obama administration launched the new Healthcare.gov. It’s mostly an online insurance shopping website. It’s very much a federal government version of sites like eHealthInsurance.com or Massachsetts’ HealthConnector site, which have been around for years.

So when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, in announcing the new site, claims it gives consumers “unprecedented transparency” into the healthcare marketplace, you should wonder what she means. But that’s not the big problem with this site. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles