Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the topic of a Health Affairs Forefront article by Neprash, Perkins and Mehrotra (2025). This is an important question as approximately one in four visits are now provided by nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) across the Medicare program. NPs and PAs can either bill payers one of two ways: They can…
There has been much debate about whether we should increase the use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants in medical care. Proponents argue that doing so may reduce cost and increase access, while critics would say that quality may decrease. An analogous issue in the dental space is use of dental hygienists as compared to…
How did the number of pediatrician and family medicine physician (FMP) change between 2010 and 2020, particularly for rural areas? A paper by Ramesh and Yu (2023) use data from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Area Health Resources Files and and county characteristics from the American Community Survey and find that: From 2010…
When you think of health care workers, many think of physicians, nurses and hospital administrators, who often make an above average salary. Not all health care workers, however, are well-paid and many even suffer from food insecurity according to a study by Srinivasan et al. (2021): Using nationally representative data from the period 2013–18, this…
Nurse practitioner employment has nearly doubled between 2010 and 2017 according to Auerbach et al. (2020). If nurse practitioners can provide similar quality for some services at lower cost, nurse practitioners could save money. If nurse practitioners can help better leverage physician time for more complex services, and increase access to care, they may be…
According to a recent paper by Young, Gruca and Nelson (2020), the answer is ‘yes’. The authors use data from the Iowa Health Professions Inventory (IHPI) to measure the number of professionals in a given area, data from the US Census’ American Community Survey (ACS) to measure the number of individuals in a given area.…
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…
Pharmacists are often seen as individuals who just dispense drugs. However, pharmacists are increasingly considered as providers that are part of the broader health care team. My own research has shown that pharmacists are a more cost-effective and safe approach to getting vaccinations compared to primary care providers (see Fontanesi et al. 2009). A Health Affairs Entry…
Many of Medicare’s alternative payment models are based on the premise that there is a lot of waste in health care. If that is the case, we could reduce cost with little to no effect on quality. While that would be nice, is that really the case? Consider two articles from the most recent edition…
Not all medical problems can or should be treated by a nurse practitioner (NP). However, may can be. Increasing access to care through NPs can reduce wait times through expanding access and decrease cost. The access and cost issues are not in doubt; the question is, can NPs improve or at least maintain patient care? …