Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
If you are an avid reader of this blog, you’ve heard about nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs). What you might not know is how they popularity has grown over the past decade. A paper by Strange (2013) cites the following statistics: With more than 85,000 PAs and 150,000 NPs eligible to practice, their…
Nurse practitioners (NPs) are non-physician clinicians that can often either assist or directly provide primary care. Some studies have found that NPs can independently manage 80 percent of patients’ primary care needs. Other studies show that NPs provide high-quality care. A recent article, however, suggests that NPs may not be cost effective. This is a curious…
Hot off the press: Walmart announced it would stop offering health insurance benefits to new part-time employees, the retailer sent out a request for information seeking partners to help it “dramatically … lower the cost of healthcare … by becoming the largest provider of primary healthcare services in the nation.” Why would Wal-mart want to…
The Boston Globe reports that some of Massachusetts largest insurers are beginning to cover medical visits made at retail clinics at CVS and Walgreens drug stores. Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota is waiving copays for visits to retail clinics. The American Association of Family Physicians (AAFP) is not happy about this. Carpe Diem says the…