Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The answer is ‘maybe’. Some are scarred by the distance between the hype and reality of electronic health records (EHR), which promised both improved efficiency for practices and superior patient health outcomes. In practice–especially in the short-turn–EMR resulted in a lot of both direct and data entry cost to practices with limited interoperability and modest…
Health care costs are high in the U.S., making up 17.9% of the U.S. economy. The Economist reports on recent key drivers of US health care cost…and the answer isn’t drugs. Mr Trump has correctly identified a big villain behind health-care cost inflation, and it is not Big Pharma. Hospitals account for over 30% of…
Are narrow networks a good thing? On the one hand, they may be able to reduce health insurance premiums if insurers can negotiate lower prices. On the other hand, narrow networks means less choice of providers for patients. An less well-understood question is how narrow networks affect health care costs and utilization. Empirically, broader networks…
One trend in recent years is how many hospitals are being purchased by large regional or national hospital chains. An April 2019 slide deck from the NIHCM Foundation shows this trend graphically. A paper by Hsieh and Rossi-Hansberg (2019) provide some aggregate data as well as a case study from the Boston area. Four decades…
An interesting article on the Marketplace Morning Report last week dives into the topic. Hundreds of nursing homes around the country have shut down leaving states to deal with what to do with people who need long term care…In Massachusetts, lawmakers have extended a $50 million lifeline to keep some nursing homes open. One nursing…
Many researchers complain that physicians often use treatments with little evidence to base these decisions. From off-label prescribing, to unstudied surgical procedures, physicians are often painted as cavalier practitioners who don’t read studies. For instance, Austin Frakt at Incidental Economist writes: The British Medical Journal sifted through the evidence for thousands of medical treatments to assess…
As the N.Y. Times reports, more transparency is coming to provider prices. The White House released an executive order Monday afternoon intended to require insurance companies, doctors and hospitals to give patients more information about precisely what their care will cost before they get it. More transparency is generally good and surprise billing for out-of-network costs has been a major…
Why have a physician do a job when a nurse could do it? Why have a nurse do it if a home health aide could do it? Clearly, the latter group in each sentence is lower cost; however, the former group may provide higher quality care. The balance of who can do what in terms…
This question is difficult to answer. In many countries with government provided health care, wait times are long. For the Veterans Affairs (VA) beneficiaries, this does not seem to be much of an issue according to a Penn et al. (2019) study covering wait times between 2014 and 2019: Although wait times in the VA…
Perhaps according to Austin Frakt. He writes in JAMA Forum: In every year since 2011, more hospitals have closed than opened…For example, 15 of the 21 hospitals that closed in 2016 were in rural communities, and since 2010, nearly 90 rural hospitals have done so. Hundreds more are at risk of closure.One source of financial challenges to…