Health Affairs

In a briefing on Thursday, April 7, Health Affairs will convene national health leaders and policy experts to discuss the current state of quality in the U.S. health care system; the latest data on costs; challenges in measuring quality and quality improvement; successful models for improving quality and safety; and where we go from here. ... Read the rest of this entry »

Although  the quality of  U.S. health care has improved over the past decade, progress has been slow – and there is still much to be done to close gaps in the quality and safety of care, as detailed in the Institute of Medicine’s 2001 report, Crossing the Quality Chasm.  Medical errors, hospital-acquired infections, and other... Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most contentious issues in drafting health reform legislation was the tax treatment of health care expenses.  From modifying the tax exclusion for employer-provided health coverage to imposing new fees on medical treatments and products, resistance to changing health tax policy underscored the immense difficulty of enacting reforms without a broad political consensus.... Read the rest of this entry »

Health Affairs today added a podcast about medical errors to its free collection of podcasts of Narrative Matters essays on iTunes U. The essay was written by Michael Rowe, an associate clinical professor in the Yale School of Medicine. Titled “The Rest Is Silence,” it appeared in the July/August 2002 edition of Health Affairs. Health Affairs offers... Read the rest of this entry »

If one performs a “Google” search with the key words: “health reform” and “US  OR America” for 2007, one will find about 160,000 links. If one does the same for 2010, there will be over 2.5 million links.  Quite a difference! This is not surprising, since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is going to affect... Read the rest of this entry »

At his blog Wright On Health, Brad Wright collects some of the best in recent health policy blogging in a year-end holiday edition of the Health Wonk Review. Among the posts Brad highlights is Michael Millenson’s Health Affairs Blog post, “Why We Still Kill Patients: Invisibility, Inertia, And Income.”

A recent front-page article in the New York Times conveyed grim news about patient safety. The first large-scale study of hospital safety in a decade concluded that care has not gotten significantly safer since the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 estimate of up to 98,000 preventable deaths and 1 million preventable injuries annually. What for me... Read the rest of this entry »

Eleven years ago today, the Institute of Medicine released To Err Is Human, a much-discussed report that launched the modern patient-safety movement. Just the other day, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine reminded us of how far we still have to go to protect patients from medical errors. To commemorate the anniversary... Read the rest of this entry »

How much does the medical liabilty system add to health care costs? How can medical errors be reduced? How often are nonemergency patients treated in hospital emergency departments, and how can those patients be shifted to more appropriate settings? These are some of the questions that were discussed at a September 7 National Press Club briefing sponsored by Health Affairs. Video of the briefing... Read the rest of this entry »

A funny thing happened on the way to the first Diagnostic Errors in Medicine Conference, from which Bob Wachter’s thoughtful commentary in the September issue of Health Affairs is drawn. A group of us struggling to “get respect” for the problem of diagnosis errors conspired to bring together several important streams of work in order... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note. This post is authored by Eugene Litvak PhD, Arnold Milstein MD, MPH and Mark Smith MD, MBA. Photos and bios for Milstein and Smith are above. Litvak is President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Optimization and also an Adjunct Professor in Operations Management in the Department of Health Policy and Management... Read the rest of this entry »

Don Berwick’s highest priority as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is transforming the American health care system in accord with the vision set forth in his 2008 “Triple Aim” Health Affairs article. (This article and all of Berwick’s Health Affairs writings are freely available in full to all readers.) Berwick spoke about... Read the rest of this entry »

Medical malpractice and reform proposals have been a longstanding battleground of U.S. health policy. On the one hand, studies have shown that health care is rife with errors and avoidable injury to patients. On the other, doctors and hospitals fear frivolous lawsuits and resent high malpractice insurance premiums. It’s been generally agreed that one result... Read the rest of this entry »

The September 2010 issue of Health Affairs is devoted to two issues that arguably were insufficiently addressed by the Affordable Care Act:  medical liability and patient safety; and the growing nonemergency use of the nation’s hospital emergency rooms. The issue contains new estimates of how much medical liability costs the health care system overall; of... Read the rest of this entry »

The September 2010 issue of Health Affairs is devoted to two issues that arguably were insufficiently addressed by the Affordable Care Act:  medical liability and patient safety; and the growing nonemergency use of the nation’s hospital emergency rooms. The issue contains new estimates of how much medical liability costs the health care system overall; of... Read the rest of this entry »

Precisely two weeks after completing my medical internship, I proceeded to nearly kill a patient. July marked the start of my second year of residency at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital, and it was my first time being fully in charge of a patient. So begins Danielle Ofri’s Narrative Matters essay in the August issue... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: The post below is by David Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, and Don Berwick, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Blumenthal will speak later today at a Washington D.C. event, “Advancing Electronic Health Records Adoption and Meaningful Use,” cosponsored by Health Affairs and the Health Industry Forum at Brandeis University.... Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the safety debate about expanding roles for nonphysician health professionals, a new study shows that allowing nurse anesthetists to provide anesthesia services without supervision from a doctor does not put patients at risk. The study appears in the August 2010 issue of Health Affairs, released today. The findings call into question a requirement that nurse anesthetists be supervised by... 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: In addition to Peter Pronovost (photo and biography above), authors of this post include Julius Pham, Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Sara Singer, Assistant Professor, Harvard School of Public Health,  Department of Health Policy and Management, Massachusetts General Hospital; Jerod Loeb, Executive Vice President for Research, The Joint... Read the rest of this entry »