It's more those smoking breaks than healthcare costs that make smokers more expensive employees.
A new analysis by researchers at Ohio State University found that employees who smoke cost private employers $5,816 more a year than nonsmoking employees. Much of the cost, about $3,077, came in lost time from smoking breaks.
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The findings of a new study published this week in BMJ Quality & Safety show the first evidence that electronic health records can play a role in reducing hospital readmissions of high-risk heart failure patients.
The study evaluated more than 1,700 adult inpatients diagnosed with heart failure, myocardial infarction and pneumonia over a two-year period at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. With the use of software developed to assess the patients on a daily basis at highest risk, researchers were able reduce the readmission rate of those studied by 26%.
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It's hard to get doctors to follow practice guidelines.
Despite the publication of numerous guidelines on the management of routine back pain, physicians surprisingly are not following the advice, and “guideline-discordant care” is on the rise, according to a study posted on the JAMA Internal Medicine website.
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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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Craig Michael Lie Njie spent a chunk of his life developing an online privacy shield, but when he tried to get his own mother to use it, she wouldn't click on the button. Why?
According to Lie Njie, loading up his software would have meant his mother acknowledging cyber-insecurity as real. Most Americans don't want to know.
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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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There was good news and bad news in a new study on the costs versus benefits of electronic health-record use in ambulatory care.
First the good news. The adoption and use of EHRs by physicians in three Massachusetts communities appears to have reduced cost growth. Use of EHRs coincided with costs that were $5.14 per patient per month lower than projected, compared with a control group, according to a report appearing July 16 online in JAMA Internal Medicine.
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Many popular mobile health applications may help improve your fitness and well-being, but users should weigh those benefits against the likely loss of privacy from the personal information they extract in return for their services, according to new reports by a California-based privacy rights group.
Unbeknownst to most users, “(m)ore than 75% of the free mobile health apps and 45% of the paid apps we researched use some kind of behavioral tracking, often through multiple third-party analytics tools,” and often with multiple tracking devices operating simultaneously.
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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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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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