Health Affairs

Misconceptions and a lack of knowledge have caused many Americans with health insurance to be at odds with policy makers when it comes to embracing the tenets of evidence-based health care. These conclusions, documented by focus groups, interviews, and an online survey, are contained in a Web first article published yesterday in Health Affairs. Kristin Carman of the... Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago I toured a hospital that had recently adopted computerized physician order entry (CPOE). We visited a patient room on the Med-Surge floor, where a nurse explained what happens in an emergency. Before they adopted CPOE, nurses would run 300 feet down the hall to find the patient’s paper record during a... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Most health policy analysts believe that better evidence about quality and value, obtained through comparative effectiveness research (CER), can drive better clinical decision making and could potentially slow the rate of growth in health care spending.  But the success of any national CER initiatives will depend on how evidence is developed, whether it... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: In terms of “bending the cost curve,” health-care providers in La Crosse, WI., have clearly demonstrated the ability to deliver high-qualty care for comparatively low costs. La Crosse was one of ten communities featured at a July 21 conference in Washington, D.C. titled “How Do They Do That?  Low-Cost, High-Quality Health Care in... Read the rest of this entry »

There is widespread agreement that greater investment in information technology (IT) is critical to reforming U.S. health care. The use of such technologies as electronic health record systems, personal health records, e-prescribing, and computerized physician order entry holds the potential for vastly improving care at a reasonable cost. The recently enacted economic stimulus legislation included... Read the rest of this entry »

With the U.S. tab for health care approaching one dollar out of every five, a key question on the health reform agenda is how to achieve value in health care. Jeanne Lambrew, the new deputy director of the White House Office on Health Reform, spoke this morning to nearly 800 health policy wonks at the... Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. John E. Wennberg of Dartmouth has earned the prestigious 2008 Gustav O. Lienhard award from the Institute of Medicine for landmark research that has stretched over four decades. By recognizing Wennberg, the IOM paid tribute this week to Wennberg’s leading role in reshaping the U.S. health care system to focus on objective evidence and... Read the rest of this entry »

In a comparison of 18 countries, the United States ranked at the bottom for number of deaths that could have been prevented by timely and effective health care. Not only were U.S. rates among the worst, the rate of improvement from 1997-98 to 2002-03 was the smallest.

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Peter Orszag today continued his assault on the elephant in health policy’s living room, the 2.1 percent “excess cost growth” by which the nation’s total health spending growth has exceeded the growth in gross domestic product (GDP) since 1975. At a reporters’ briefing sponsored by Health Affairs, Orszag unveiled a... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Why have so few provider groups undertaken the self-analysis that the Virginia Mason Medical Center (VMMC) entered into through its use of the famed Toyota Production System, even before Aetna and large employers began to push VMMC to cut costs? This is just one question posed by James C. Robinson, Berkeley economist and... Read the rest of this entry »

This past month the most-read posts on the Health Affairs Blog focused particularly on the quest for value and quality via evidence-based medicine (EBM), comparative effectiveness lessons from the UK, and new research on quality and P4P. Other highly read posts covered the continuing presidential campaign and state health reform debates; immigration policy; and a... Read the rest of this entry »

In an interview published online at Health Affairs [2-week free access], David Eddy, founder and medical director of Archimedes Inc. in Aspen, Colorado, discusses evidence-based medicine (EBM) with Sean Tunis, founder and director of the Center for Medical Technology Policy in San Francisco. Archimedes was founded to improve the quality and efficiency of health care... Read the rest of this entry »

What happens when a government agency in charge of assessing the effectiveness of medical interventions crunches numbers and tells pharmaceutical companies their drugs are just too expensive? Sometimes, the government gets a better deal. Twice last week, the much-feared National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in England and Wales was a factor in... Read the rest of this entry »