Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
New regulation is making hospital prices available to patients. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) reports: As of January 1 of this year, hospitals are required to post prices of common health services on their websites via consumer-friendly tools for patient use. Prior to implementation of this rule, hospitals were only required to publish their gross,…
How do you get your prescription drugs? For most people, it involves going to your local pharmacy and picking up your pills. But what if the drugs you needs are infused treatments that have to be administered at a physician’s office? Typically, you just show up at a physician’s office and it’ll be ready for…
A book by Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind argued that big businesses–rather than small businesses–are the drivers of the economy. That book had the catchy title “Big is Beautiful“. A related question in the area of health economics is whether larger physician practices do better than smaller physician practices. Perhaps large practices can benefit from…
Is your hospital high quality? Well, this depends on what quality means. Does it have low readmission rates? Low rates of mortality? Do they follow clinical guidelines? Are patients satisfied? Are they good at cardiology care? What about cancer treatment? Combining all these different dimensions of quality is a complex task. The Centers for Medicare…
One reason for worse health outcomes for racial minorities could be reduced access to pharmacies. However, how big a problem is pharmacy access? A recent Health Affairs paper by Guadamuz et al. (2021) uses 2007-2015 data from the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) to identify pharmacies, which were then geocoded and linked to…
That is one trend as reported in Modern Healthcare. Being able to better managed health care spend across medical and pharmacy is one reason. In 2018 alone, about 76% of hospitals with over 600 beds operated a specialty pharmacy, in comparison to a little under half in 2016, according to American Society of Hospital Pharmacists. Growth in…
Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) aim to use coordinated care to increase quality and lower cost. While everyone likes the sound of integrated care, it may be less clear how ACOs are aiming to achieve these goals. In a recent Health Affairs blog post, Micklos and co-authors review one study found that: …Next Gen ACO participants…
Quality of care is difficult to measure. Even if you had a perfect measure of quality in terms of health outcomes, risk adjustment is imperfect. For instance, academic medical centers are often assumed to have high quality, but actual outcomes observed in the data may not be that good if they also receive the sickest,…
There are a few sub-questions we need to break down to answer before answering this one larger question. These sub-questions include: Is nursing staff turnover at nursing homes a big problem? Is nursing staff turnover correlated with quality of care? Does using nursing staff turnover as a quality metric provide the right incentives? A paper…
Urgent care centers are on the rise. Back in 2013, there were only 6,100, but this number increased to 9,616 by late 2019 a 7.9% average annual increase. The rise of urgent care could have positive or negative impacts on overall health care spending. On the one hand, increased supply could lead to higher cost…