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Patient-safety issues raised by the critics of limits on resident duty hours have not materialized. But concerns about doctors-in-training spending less time with patients appear to be valid, according to two new studies in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education set an 80-hour weekly work limit (averaged over four weeks) in 2003. Further limits, including restricting first-year residents to 16-hour shifts went into effect in 2011. The movement to limit resident work hours was originally driven by Sidney Zion, a journalist, prosecutor and novelist, whose 18-year-old daughter Libby died a few hours after being admitted to New York Hospital on the night of March 4, 1984. His fight led to New York state limiting residents to an 80-hour workweek and 24-hour shifts in 1989.
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It's enough to make your head spin. Estimated costs for visits to hospital emergency departments for dizziness-related complaints exceed $4 billion a year, according to a new study.
Dizziness and vertigo are the chief symptoms presented by 3.9 million—or about 4%—of all emergency department patients, Johns Hopkins University researchers report
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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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