Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the University of Pennsylvania bioethicist and oncologist who helped the White House draft the healthcare reform law, aims fire in today's Wall Street Journal at U.S. News & World Report's "Best Hospitals" rankings. Calling the methodology behind the rankings "flawed to the point of being useless," he blasts their overreliance on reputation and a failure to take into account quality criteria such as hospital-acquired infections and incidence of preventable falls and bed sores.
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The latest is not always the greatest in medical treatments, according to a study posted on the Mayo Clinic Proceedings website. It reviewed the findings of more than 1,300 previously published reports on medical practices.
Clinical areas where current practice standards were contradicted by published studies include the drug aprotinin used in cardiac surgery, the use of hormone therapy for postmenopausal women, the use of pulmonary artery catheters, the recommended glycemic targets for diabetics, and the use of arthroscopic surgery of the knee for osteoarthritis.
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Home-care workers are growing inpatient with the White House's delay in publishing a regulation that would bring them overtime pay and the federal minimum wage.
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Doctors asked to assess options for reducing healthcare costs were not exactly enthusiastic about replacing the system that pays them based on the volume of tests, exams and procedures they perform.
Granted, cuts to Medicare physician pay proved even less popular among the nearly 3,000 doctors surveyed on their opinions for strategies to blunt the nation's high and rising healthcare costs. Just 1% of the polled physicians described their attitude toward this option as “very enthusiastic.”
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The American Medical Association has responded sharply to a July 20 Washington Post investigative article that found that the AMA/Specialty Society RVS Update Committee (RUC) has overvalued many procedures by overstating the amount of physicians' time required to perform them. Washington Monthly published a critical article about the RUC earlier this month, similarly charging that the RUC is essentially a secret cabal of specialty physicians that overvalues services and fixes prices.
The Post reporters counted the number of Medicare procedures that gastroenterologists, ophthalmologists, orthopedists and other specialists performed at surgery centers in Florida and Pennsylvania. They found that if the physicians had taken the amount of time estimated by the RUC to do each procedure, they would have had to work an average of more than 12 hours a day, when the surgery centers typically were open only 10 hours.
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A new report from the Government Accountability Office provides 2013 health plan premiums in the individual market in all 50 states. It provides useful baseline information as insurers shift in 2014 to complying with the federal healthcare reform law's new rules governing the insurance market.
The premium information in the GAO report was taken from data submitted by insurers to the HHS Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight and displayed on the government's health plan finder website, HealthCare.gov.
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Hospitals looking for guidance on the health reform law's insurance exchanges, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program—as well as information on how to help people enroll in those programs—received some help this week from the American Hospital Association.
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Mobile computing devices are becoming almost as much of an essential tool in U.S. physician practices as the exam table, according to a new survey.
Nearly 80% of 300 U.S. practicing physicians in primary care, family and internal medicine that were sampled and surveyed in April said they were using a smartphone in their “day-to-day practice.” Another 61% were using mobile tablets.
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Simply extending office hours may not be enough for pediatricians to persuade patients to come to them rather than to retail clinics, according to a new study posted on the JAMA Pediatrics website. It found that almost half of children's visits to in-store healthcare facilities occur when pediatric offices are likely to be open.
The survey conducted by researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine found that when parents took their children to a retail clinic, 47% of the reported visits occurred between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays or between 8 a.m. and noon on Saturdays.
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Stepped-up federal funding resulted in more seniors receiving training in how to stop Medicare fraud in 2012, but the latest annual survey of the $20 million program shows it produced $134,000 in actual savings.
Many illegal schemes rely on seniors who aren't savvy in how fraudsters and opportunists can use Medicare numbers to bill for care and equipment that is unneeded or never delivered. The Obama administration greatly increased the funding in 2010, 2011 and 2012 to bolster the so-called Senior Medicare Patrol program, which educates them with a branch in each U.S. state, plus Washington, D.C. and three territories.
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“The Bishops Must Kill the CHA.”
That's what a writer for the National Catholic Register is calling for, a week after officials from the Catholic Health Association said they were now satisfied with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's contraception provision.
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