Health Affairs

On Tuesday, June 5, Health Affairs will hold a briefing to discuss its June 2012 issue, “Focus On The Care Span For The Elderly And Disabled.” The volume explores a wide range of topics — from avoidable hospital admissions and readmissions, to coordination of care for dual eligibles, to reforming Medicare payment for skilled nursing... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: For more on the state of prevention efforts and the impact of the cuts to the Prevention and Public Health Fund, see Health Affairs Blog “Contributing Voices” posts by Georges Benjamin and Jeffrey Levi. The latest policy brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focuses on the Prevention and Public... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: For more on the state of prevention efforts and the impact of the cuts to the Prevention and Public Health Fund, see this Health Affairs Blog “Contributing Voices” post by Georges Benjamin and an additional post about a Health Policy Brief on the Fund. The Prevention and Public Health Fund, created by the... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: For more on the state of prevention efforts and the impact of the cuts to the Prevention and Public Health Fund, see this Health Affairs Blog “Contributing Voices” post by Jeffrey Levi and an additional post about a Health Policy Brief on the Fund. Two years ago with enactment of the Affordable Care... Read the rest of this entry »

One of the initiatives in the Affordable Care Act of 2010 is the expansion of community health centers to provide primary care to millions of newly insured, low-income Americans. The same law promotes the patient-centered medical home model. A community center’s qualifications to be classified as a patient-centered medical home are evaluated through an assessment... Read the rest of this entry »

Video of the release event for the January issue of Health Affairs, “Confronting The Growing Diabetes Crisis,” is now available on the Health Affairs Web site.

Editor’s Note: The January 2012 issue of Health Affairs is a thematic volume titled “Confronting The Growing Diabetes Crisis.” Ariella was a different child, thin and shy, when I first met her about a year and a half ago, just after her 6th birthday. Her mother had noted her thirst and hunger, and, despite this... Read the rest of this entry »

Diabetes now affects nearly twenty-six million Americans, and over the next decade, an estimated forty million more US adults could develop the condition. Another 100 million more could suffer from an insidious prediabetic condition, one that often leads to the full-blown disease.  Growing scientific evidence suggests that lifestyle interventions, such as weight loss and fitness... Read the rest of this entry »

Having diabetes can carry  many health consequences, but a new study in the January issue of Health Affairs shows that it also highly influences a young person’s ability to complete high school, be employed, and earn a living wage.  High school dropout rates among young people with diabetes are six percentage points higher than for... Read the rest of this entry »

Surgeon General Regina Benjamin will keynote Health Affairs‘ release event for its January 2012 issue, “Confronting the Growing Diabetes Crisis.” The briefing will take place on Tuesday, January 10, from 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill. The new Health Affairs issue will explore the challenges that the increase in... Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, January 10, Health Affairs will release its January 2012 issue, “Confronting the Growing Diabetes Crisis.” The volume explores the challenges that the increase in prevalence of prediabetes and diabetes represents for public health and health care systems in the United States and internationally. A particular focus of the issue is opportunities for diabetes... Read the rest of this entry »

This Friday, Oct. 14, 2011, a working meeting of innovators, policy and health IT experts, health care providers, patient organizations, technology companies, and government agencies will convene in Washington to assess progress in improving transitions in care and prioritize how the increasing availability of health IT can address some of the most intractable challenges related... Read the rest of this entry »

A posting on the Health Affairs blog earlier this year by Carol Levine asked the pointed question: “The year of the family caregiver- in what country?”  In it, she compared the “Year of the Family Caregiver” in the U.S. to the recent elections in Canada, where politicians were competing to see who could provide a... Read the rest of this entry »

Prevention is critical to reducing rates of chronic disease, premature death and disability, and controlling health care costs. This point has been made many times over by health care and health policy experts both in the United States and abroad. Unfortunately, our current health care system is not set up to incentivize prevention efforts and... Read the rest of this entry »

Don Berwick, the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will keynote Health Affairs’ September 8 briefing on controlling health care costs. At the briefing, Health Affairs will release its September 2011 issue, “The New Urgency To Lower Costs.” Topics to be discussed include chronic disease costs and opportunities for savings through prevention; who bears... Read the rest of this entry »

A column by New York Times columnist David Brooks titled “Death and Budgets,” read in combination with a recent report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“Medicare Hospices that Focus on Nursing Facility Residents”), makes painfully clear how urgently America must rethink the way... Read the rest of this entry »

On September 8, Health Affairs will release its September 2011 issue, “Confronting Costs.” The issue explores the third element of the famed Three-Part Aim for health care: namely, the objective of lowering costs. Topics to be discussed include chronic disease costs and opportunities for savings through prevention; who bears the burden of health costs; the... Read the rest of this entry »

The federal government’s Beacon Program provides funding to 17 communities that have already made inroads in the development of secure, private, and accurate systems of electronic health record (EHR) adoption and health information exchange. This is the fifth in a series of Health Affairs Blog posts in which leaders of several Beacon communities discuss their... Read the rest of this entry »

The burden imposed on our society by type 2 diabetes mellitus has grown dramatically over the last decade.  Greater numbers of people than ever before are being diagnosed with diabetes at younger ages.  These people and their families must face the spectrum of implications brought on by diabetes, including its many associated medical complications. The... Read the rest of this entry »

The first study of its kind to examine regional and state differences in Medicaid spending shows that there is wide variation in spending per beneficiary, and that some large states are spending more than twice as much per beneficiary as other states of similar size. What’s more, some of the interstate variation in Medicaid spending... Read the rest of this entry »