Care Transitions: The Business Case
National Media Alerted to Care Transitions Project Sites (PDF)
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services cites need for eliminating “fragmented care” to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations among nation's Medicare beneficiaries.
Interactive Map: See How Much Health Care Costs Around the U.S.
Based in information from the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, this map shows reimbursements, surgeries and Medicare enrollee populations per hospital referral region.
CMS's Hospital-Acquired Condition Lists Link Hospital Payment, Patient Safety (4-page PDF)
This commentary from Carolyn Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, discusses how changes in reimbursement policies should drive evidence-based interventions to improve patient care.
Improving data quality control in quality improvement projects (6-page PDF)
Data quality control is essential to ensure the integrity of results from QI projects. Feasible methods are available and important to help ensure that stakeholder’s decisions are based on accurate data.
AHRQ: More than 4 Million Potentially Preventable Admissions Cost Hospitals Nearly $31 Billion
American hospitals spent nearly $31 billion—10 percent of their total patient care budget ——in 2006 on more than 4 million patient stays that could possibly have been prevented with timely and effective ambulatory care, according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
Beyond 50: AARP Reports to the Nation (116 pages, 4.09MB PDF)
This series of reports from AARP focuses on issues and concerns for the aging population. The 2009 report focuses on chronic care from the consumer perspective. Focus groups and survey conducted for the study provide an insightful view at how patients and caregivers experience the health care system and the challenges of coordinating care.
Financial and Health Burdens of Chronic Conditions Grow
Of the 72 million working-age Americans who live with chronic conditions, three in 10 live in families having problems paying medical bills. This report from the Center for Studying Health System Change reviews the results from the Community Tracking Study.
The Care Transitions Business Plan
This overview from Dr. Coleman’s Care Transitions Intervention summarizes the human resources and capital investments for implementing and sustaining a Care Transitions intervention.
Planning for Scale: A Guide for Designing Large-Scale Improvement Initiatives
IHI has published a new white paper designed to help organizations move from isolated quality successes to large-scale improvement. It can enable your team to take the effective care practices you have achieved in one setting and make them ubiquitous across a health care system.
Healthcare Promise: A Blueprint to Deliver the Promise of Healthcare Reform
This paper presents a vision of how this can be accomplished quickly, within existing infrastructure and through clear steps that will align goals across the healthcare continuum.
The Billion Dollar U-Turn
Readmissions pose enormous financial and quality of care problems. Hospitals are under intense pressure to do something about them-right now.
MedPac Report to Congress: Promoting Greater Efficiency in Medicare, June 2007
Office of Inspector General: Consecutive Medicare Stays Involving Inpatient and Skilled Nursing Facilities, June 2007
“Inside CMS: Exclusive news on the most powerful agency in health care”
Will CMS curtail payments to skilled nursing facilities with high rehospitalization rates?
Patients' Perception of Hospital Care in the United States
Using data from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), researchers examined patients' experiences in U.S. hospitals—in the first study of its kind—and found that patients have moderately high levels of satisfaction with their care. The quality of clinical care and certain hospital characteristics, such as a higher ratio of nurses to patient-days, were associated with greater patient satisfaction.
Change the Way We Pay for Health Care, Experts Say
More than two-thirds of respondents to the latest Commonwealth Fund/Modern Healthcare Health Care Opinion Leaders Survey believe the way we pay for health care in the United States must be fundamentally reformed. Fee-for-service payment—the most prevalent system throughout the country—is not effective in encouraging high-quality, efficient care, they say.
In the survey, there was strong support for a move away from fee-for-service payment toward bundled approaches—that is, making a single payment for all services provided to a patient during the course of an episode or period of time. Under fee-for-service, providers are reimbursed for individual services, like hospital stays and medical procedures, rather than for providing the most appropriate care for the patient over the course of an illness. This creates incentives for providing more technical and more expensive—but not necessarily more effective—care.
IBM: Healthcare 2015 and Care Delivery (97.9kb PDF)
Healthcare providers can work collaboratively to achieve new milestones in defining, measuring and delivering value, activating responsible citizens and developing new models for promoting health and delivering care, even within growing resource constraints and other challenges.
Heart Failure Hospitalizations Up Sharply
Hospitalization rates for heart failure among older Americans have increased dramatically in the past three decades, an epidemic that represents a mounting burden on the health-care system, a 2008 study has found.
The Urgency of Systemic Change (19 minute video)
Karen Davis, former chair of the department of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, is president of the Commonwealth Fund. In this interview she discusses “bending the curve in health care spending” among other topics related to significant policy changes needed in American health care.
Brownsville Herald: Agency uses Valley as test site for new program
If successful, this program could change the health care landscape in the Valley.
The Monitor: Rio Grande Valley to be part of study to cut hospital re-admissions
The federal agency that oversees Medicare has chosen the Rio Grande Valley as one of 14 sites to test a nationwide program that would cut down on re-admissions to the hospital and improve patients' health.
Valley Morning Star: Valley chosen to test health care program
Of the approximately 13,000 Medicare patients hospitalized each year in the Brownsville, Harlingen and Weslaco areas, about one-fourth return to the hospital within 30 days.
Development of a Plan to Transition to a Medicare Value-Based Purchasing Program for Physician and Other Professional Services (PDF)
This 36-page paper outlines the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ plan for the value-based purchasing program. It includes the goals, objectives, assumptions and design principles.
Better Care, Better Bottom Line for Hospitals
(Medscape registration required)
A large-scale study clearly demonstrated hospital palliative care consultation programs save hospitals money. Palliative care resulted in a savings of approximately $300 per day per palliative care patient. For the average 400-bed hospital, this translates into a savings of about $1.3 million per year.