Emergency department doctors are being blamed for prescribing painkillers like OxyContin to drug-seeking patients, and 48 states have created or passed laws to create prescription drug monitoring programs to help identify who they are.
But a new study by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that clinicians actually prescribed more painkillers for alleged drug-seeking patients—identified as those who seek painkillers from four or more different clinicians or hospitals in a twelve-month period—after checking with the monitoring programs.
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More ailing joints, hearts and other chronic medical conditions may be to blame for higher spending by Medicare in some communities compared with others, new research suggests.
The study, published by the journal Health Services Research, analyzed Medicare spending across 60 communities for two acute conditions and eight chronic conditions, including heart disease, diabetes and joint degeneration in the knee, lower leg, neck or back.
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Patients are more likely to fill prescriptions that treat costly, chronic diseases when health insurers offer them a financial incentive to do so through value-based insurance design. That's the good news in a research review just published by the journal Health Affairs.
The bad news? Research has yet to show any significant drop in overall medical spending, wrote authors of the review, which examined prior studies of value-based design and proper medication use.
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Delays in key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act last week last week are spawning congressional actions this week.
The Obama administration's surprise July 2 announcement that it will delay for one year the requirement that large employers provide qualifying insurance coverage for their workers or face tax penalties spurred told-you-sos from Republicans in Congress.
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The healthcare industry, with the federal government at the helm, is setting sail on a voyage into the unknown: whether and to what extent patients are suffering harm from the systems that providers have spent many billions of dollars buying, and the feds many billions in incentivizing.
“That's the part we don't know,” said Dr. Ron Wyatt, medical director, division of healthcare improvement at the Joint Commission. “We know that probably less than 10% of adverse events are reported. That's how big the water is.”
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The editor of the Journal of the Medical Association has peeled back a controversial rule adopted three years ago to protect the integrity of clinical trials.
Dr. Howard Bauchner, in an editorial posted online, wrote that requiring outside academic biostatisticians to review the findings of industry-funded clinical trials will no longer be a requirement for publication. "Advances over the past decade in standards of clinical trial reporting, enhanced understanding of the threats to validity of clinical research, increasing data transparency, and our experience support the change in policy," he wrote.
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The NEJM study out today analyzing Oregon's Medicaid program is drawing heated commentary across the web. The study suggested people added to the Medicaid rolls spend more on healthcare than other poor people, but don't necessarily wind up with better health with two major exceptions: they had less depression and they were financially more secure.
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New knees, a more active life, yet more weight gain? Counterintuitive, but a new study suggests a connection.
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Wellness is a well-trod path for many major companies looking for ways to cut down on employee healthcare
costs and increase productivity. Most programs focus on getting people to change unhealthy habits like smoking, poor diet or lack of exercise. Sometimes they encourage people to monitor their blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar and take appropriate medications where necessary. The goal is to avoid more serious—and costly—medical complications down the road.
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