Health Affairs

Today, on National Healthcare Decisions Day, authors Kate O’Malley of the California HealthCare Foundation and Nancy Zweibel of the Retirement Research Foundation, discuss how foundation efforts have contributed to the adoption and expansion of a standard paradigm for end-of-life planning. Many people assume that their family members know the kind of care they would want... Read the rest of this entry »

The author previously led national quality and patient safety initiatives at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, including its twelve-year program to bring palliative care into the nation’s hospitals. She is the principal author of The Treatment Trap, The Battle Over Health Care: What Obama’s Reform Means for America’s Future, and the forthcoming book, Medicare Meltdown... Read the rest of this entry »

This post, by my colleague Chris Fleming, originally appeared on Health Affairs Blog, which is GrantWatch Blog’s “big sister” blog here at the journal. On November 21, Health Affairs released a series of Web First articles profiling the winners of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Young Leaders Awards, which were announced this Fall on... Read the rest of this entry »

GrantWatch Blog asked the author, a staffer at the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, in Pittsburgh, to report on a conference that the funder and the Coalition for Quality at End of Life convened this spring. Readmissions Reduction. Health Information Technology. Patient-Centered Medical Home. Cost Effectiveness. Best Practice. Provider Education. Workforce Training. Care Transitions. Public-Private Partnerships. Policy... Read the rest of this entry »

In reverse order, number three in the rankings was on Medicaid, and number two was on health reform (certainly not surprising). Number one (the most-read post during the month) was a round-up of posts from other foundation-related blogs. In case you missed the Health Affairs GrantWatch Tweet and/or e-alert when they were sent out, the... Read the rest of this entry »

I have put together a listing here of some foundation-related blog posts that you may want to check out. Now that summer has arrived, perhaps things are slowing down in your workplace, and you now have time for some professional reading! Links to a wide variety of posts follow. Incidentally, if you work for a... Read the rest of this entry »

We list below the three most-read posts during the month. Take a look in case you missed one of these when the original tweet or e-alert went out. 1. “Foundation Blogs Round-up: Community Clinics, Health Reform, Health IT, & More,” by Lee-Lee Prina (March 31). First on the most-read list during April was a selected... Read the rest of this entry »

Read about the California HealthCare Foundation’s effort to be a catalyst for change in this area. While access to palliative care has been steadily increasing in hospital settings over the past decade, a survey published in 2007 on the availability of palliative care in California and funded by the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), found that... Read the rest of this entry »

Today I want to tell you about a blog post published recently on the John A. Hartford Foundation’s health AGEnda blog. Its focus is patient-centered care. This post does not contain theoretical or hypothetical musings about that topic, and it is not a dry recitation of facts. Instead, the information presented here is very real,... Read the rest of this entry »

End-of-life care presents emotional, physical, and financial burdens for patients and their loved ones. At the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF), in Pittsburgh, we have become somewhat fixated on the fact that the health care system too often fails families and patients at end of life. Unfortunately, failure is what most people expect. But JHF end-of-life... Read the rest of this entry »

Our discussions at the recent health funders’ retreat at Brandeis University drove home an important point. The Affordable Care Act is a lot more than a series of provisions to assure access to health care coverage for millions of uninsured Americans. The new health reform law creates opportunities to develop fundamental and complementary payment and... Read the rest of this entry »

The high cost of end-of-life care in the United States has been a source of hand-wringing among health economists and policy wonks for decades. (See “End-of-Life Savings: A ‘Fool’s Gold’ of Reform” on the Health Affairs Blog.) Nonetheless, a wise man once said, “Every problem has a solution.” This problem has a solution, too, and grantmakers... Read the rest of this entry »

A new GrantWatch paper, “A Philanthropy Tackles Growth in Health Costs at the State Level” was released today as part of the July 2010 issue of Health Affairs. Authors David Sandman, senior vice president of the New York State Health (NYSHealth) Foundation, and Anthony Kovner, a professor of public health and health management at the... Read the rest of this entry »