The pursuit of health equity – ensuring equal access to opportunities that enable all communities to lead healthy lives – is a critical task for the U.S. The direct and indirect medical costs associated with sickness and premature death resulting from health care inequities are enormous (estimated to be $230 billion and $1.24 trillion, respectively,… Read More »
“I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!” Remember that catchphrase of the late 1980s and early 1990s, based on the television commercial for LifeCall? Well, the Mrs. Fletcher of yesterday would be amazed by the wearable devices of today – they might even be able to prevent her fall in the first place! According to… Read More »
One of the challenges in delivering efficient medical care is identifying people who are at risk of a negative outcome, so we can focus our efforts on screening and treating those at elevated risk. We do this in individual face-to-face encounters through clinical, diagnostic processes: taking a patient’s history, performing a physical examination, recording signs… Read More »
Cancer is a dreaded disease – and in the US, a typical response to a cancer diagnosis is to try every treatment available in hopes that something might work. Understandable! But cancer overtreatment is a serious problem that drives up costs, causes avoidable morbidity and mortality, and reduces the quality of care. What is overtreatment?… Read More »
Recently, I sat down to talk with Arlene Ash, PhD about risk adjustment. Dr. Ash is Professor and Chief of the Division of Biostatistics and Health Services Research, Department of Quantitative Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. As a methods expert on risk adjustment in health services research, she has pioneered tools… Read More »
Reproductive rights have been a topic for policy making and legal jurisprudence throughout much of the past century. As the healthcare system of the United States continues to evolve, women’s health and reproductive rights remain central to the debate. A recent policy update by Aishwarya Rajagopalan and Lisa Lines here at The Medical Care Blog discusses… Read More »
The burden of contraception falls primarily on women. In the United States, women need prescriptions for the majority of contraceptive methods, and so are vulnerable to changes in the healthcare system affecting access to care. Recently, President Trump has issued executive orders on religious liberty and related subjects that have paved the way for a rule… Read More »
The functionality and popularity of consumer-grade activity trackers (such as Fitbit) appear to be ever-increasing. If you don’t personally own one, you probably know at least one or two people who do. In an online survey of 1,000 respondents [PDF], conducted in 2016 by PwC, 45% owned a fitness band, with “Health” being the primary… Read More »
Emergency departments (EDs) nationwide are busy places. In some locales they are overcrowded. In places like Los Angeles and other dense, urban areas with high poverty, they are over-capacity to such an extent that they can grind to a halt for all but the highest priority cases. In years past, it was not unheard of for… Read More »
What’s the first thing you do when you get sick? For many people, a cursory search through various online resources is the initial step in gathering information toward obtaining a diagnosis. The internet places an infinite number of health-related resources at our fingertips, many of which are consumed through social media. Presently, 74% of US… Read More »
Medical claims data are collected for payment purposes. However, these data are often used for other purposes such as studying quality of care, assessing provider performance, and measuring health. These data are a rich resource for health services research, but when they do not include key pieces of information we can find ourselves bending over… Read More »
Despite a rapid expansion in the use of buprenorphine-naloxone (bup-nx) as a treatment for opioid use disorder, there is little understanding of the patterns of treatment. In a newly published-ahead-of-print Medical Care article, Brendan Saloner and colleagues from Johns Hopkins used an all-payer claims database to investigate what factors predict the duration of treatment, dosage, and continuity of treatment for… Read More »
This post is the final one in our 4-part series focusing on presentations that were delivered at a special panel session at APHA16 on the childhood roots of health inequity [part 1, part 2, part 3]. Our fourth presenter, Dr. Jennifer Manly, is Associate Professor of Neuropsychology in Neurology at the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the… Read More »
Anytime I see the words “cost saving” in reference to a public health or medical intervention, my first thought is “Yeah, right!” It just doesn’t happen that often. One can spend more money to get better outcomes (or more care provided), or less money for worse outcomes, but rarely less money AND better outcomes. However,… Read More »
I’ll never forget the time Granddaddy tried to eat my hand. At least that’s how it seemed to me at age six. In reality, he’d simply confused my hand with the straw sticking out of the milkshake we’d brought to him at the nursing home. By that point in his early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, the Granddaddy… Read More »
The population of the U.S is progressively becoming older; however, healthy aging is no longer an oxymoron. The availability of preventative medicine and health promotion programs have extended how long people can live healthy lives without chronic disability. Those aged 65 and over are projected to reach 83.7 million by 2050 [PDF]. While modern medicine has become… Read More »
Violence against women and girls is an international concern that cuts across all sectors of society. The United Nations defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary… Read More »
Republican Congressional leaders are currently debating how to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as part of the budget reconciliation process. Much of the debate over the ACA has focused on the individual mandate (and here) and the affordability (here and here) of coverage in the state-based marketplaces. The House version of the legislation, however,… Read More »
This post is the third in our series focusing on presentations that were delivered at a special panel session at APHA16 on the childhood roots of health inequity [part 1, part 2]. Our third presenter, Kerith Conron, ScD, MPH, is currently the Blachford-Cooper Distinguished Scholar and Research Director at The Williams Institute of UCLA’s School… Read More »
To gauge the effects of medical interventions, we often use meta-analysis to combine the results of randomized control trials (RCTs). RCTs commonly use odds ratios (ORs) to measure the effect of a given intervention on the frequencies of events. Conventional methods of estimating overall ORs suffer from a number of issues. Drs. Chang and Hoaglin describe… Read More »
In an effort to improve the validity and person-centeredness of the nursing home resident assessment tool (the Minimum Data Set, or MDS), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services introduced version 3.0 in October 2010. As a result, many of the measures and items health services researchers had grown accustomed to using in the MDS… Read More »
Let’s be honest, who doesn’t love cat videos? I’m not even a cat person, and I find cat videos to be extremely entertaining. Even if you don’t love cats or cat videos, you have to admit that internet cats have become quite a cultural phenomenon. In 2014, there were about 2 million cat videos on YouTube,… Read More »
High-quality evidence supports the use of medical marijuana for chronic pain, neuropathic pain, and other conditions. Yet, patients who live in some states can’t legally use it — and are threatened with loss of access to their prescribed pain medications if they do. I know this because a close family member of mine has chronic pain.… Read More »
Adequacy of healthcare for transgender patients has recently come to light, particularly with the increased discussion of trans persons in the media. Trans individuals identify their gender differently from their assigned sex at birth. Trans healthcare is an emerging field of research, and this increased focus continues to uncover the lack of knowledge amongst providers… Read More »
In the era of value-based care, caregivers and policymakers alike are intensely interested in strategies to reduce 30-day hospital readmissions. Researchers continue to offer up helpful tools in this effort. Recently published online ahead of print in Medical Care, Burke and colleagues make an important contribution with their article The Hospital Score Predicts Potentially Preventable 30-Day Readmissions… Read More »
The year 2016 was a big one for The Medical Care Blog: in February, we moved from our old publisher-hosted location and launched this new domain and design. We’ve published 61 posts here since then – a little more than one a week. We’ve added many new contributors and broadened our audience. Thank you for reading!… Read More »
Private practitioners are busy people between caring for their patients, recording and documenting data, going to meetings, keeping up with new treatment modalities, and running a practice group. They follow a tight schedule, have multiple sources of pressure, and suffer from burnout. Stress occurs when a person is drained of energy, but can recover. In the case of… Read More »
Every year, 340,000 Americans are diagnosed with cancer, and fully 4 in 10 of these diagnoses will be colorectal cancer (CRC). CRC is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States; however, 60% of CRC deaths could be prevented if everyone 50 years old and older were screened. By instituting patient-centered communication, we… Read More »
Access to interpreters improves health care and is generally required by law. Why then, is interpretation access hard to come by in hospitals? From a hospital staff perspective, appropriate policies may be in place, and hospital staff motivated to offer excellent patient care, but all the demands of providing medical care can lead to system breakdown.… Read More »
Children who grow up in stressful environments, without adequate adult support, are at much greater risk of developing heart disease, cancer, and many other diseases as adults. This is partly because of the coping behaviors that people use to deal with stress, but also because of the cumulative effects of toxic stress. Thus, many of… Read More »
Being hospitalized with a serious medical condition, surrounded by strange equipment, and listening to medical jargon you’ve never heard before is an intimidating situation for anyone. Compounding the uncertainty and stress of the situation would be not understanding the primary language spoken by your providers, not being able to read your procedure consents, and knowing… Read More »
In my medical practice, lacking the tools to communicate meaningfully with other providers who are caring for my patients is a daily frustration. This is only magnified when it comes to caring for my most vulnerable patients who have difficulty communicating for themselves, such as those suffering from substance use disorders (SUDs), so I was… Read More »
After a whirlwind APHA 2016 in Denver, we are back with a quick summary of the meeting and Medical Care Section events. There were about 11,600 conference registrants overall. We were impressed with the great turnout for Medical Care Section events. We had standing room only for the Special Invited Panel Session: The Childhood Roots of Health Inequity, a… Read More »
With the mania of the presidential election in full tilt and the election just days away, it’s hard to have a rational public discussion about health care. Supporters of the two presidential candidates have drawn a deep and divisive line (or rather a tectonic fissure) in the sand about health care reform. This is due, in great part, to the bombastic, and ultimately… Read More »
Expanding health insurance coverage may improve health care access [PDF] and reduce financial stress [PDF]. Ideally, having health insurance and the resultant access to care should improve health outcomes and well-being, although the evidence is complicated and mixed. One thing is sure: expanded insurance coverage typically leads to more utilization – a concern for policymakers and administrators because… Read More »
In just a few days, thousands of public health practitioners, students, scholars, and activists will descend on Denver, Colorado for APHA 2016. This year, your faithful co-editors will be there, live-tweeting about sessions! So be sure to follow @MedCareBloggers for real-time updates. Here are just a few of the sessions we’re looking forward to this year:… Read More »
A small section of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) packs a potentially big punch: State Innovation Waivers allow states to ask the federal government for authority to change parts of the ACA, namely the individual and employer mandates, establishment of state exchanges, and financial help to purchase insurance. These waivers can be used by states… Read More »
Paying for value, rewarding high-value care, pay-for-performance—all are examples of terminology used to describe aligning financial incentives with clinical goals and processes. Essentially, these policies and programs seek to link quality to payment and their influence is growing, extending even to Medicare. While these concepts have been discussed repeatedly by many in healthcare, including the… Read More »
Provider burnout and turnover [PDF] is a major challenge for many community health centers. One factor contributing to this problem is workplace climate, or what the experience of working at the health center is like. As anyone in primary care will tell you, at times it can be overwhelming. Thus it was with great interest that… Read More »
Dual eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid is expected to improve access to care for low-income individuals who qualify for both programs, relative to eligibility for either program alone. Medicaid coverage of Medicare deductibles and co-payments can reduce the financial burdens that these cost sharing requirements may pose for low-income Medicare beneficiaries. These dual eligible beneficiaries… Read More »
According to the 2013 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, hospital inpatient expenses account for a large portion (nearly 30%) of total health care expenses and health care spending is highly concentrated among a relatively small proportion of individuals. The top 1% of spenders accounted for 21.5% of total expenditures while the lower 50% accounted for just… Read More »
In 1999, the Institute of Medicine released a report called To Err is Human. This report estimated that 44,000 to 98,000 hospitalized patients die each year as a result of preventable medical errors. But how do medical errors affect healthcare workers? A recent article by Van Gerven and colleagues, published ahead of print in Medical Care, addresses that… Read More »
In 2013, there were 10.7 million people enrolled [PDF] in both Medicare and Medicaid. Dual eligibility depends on age, income, and disability. Dually enrolled beneficiaries are also responsible for a large share of program costs overall; 31% of Medicare fee-for-services spending for 18% of beneficiaries [PDF] who are dually enrolled. Given the additional health challenges [PDF] faced by dual eligibles, this… Read More »
As I sat at my desk daydreaming about my family’s upcoming August beach vacation and remembering good times from last year’s beach trip with the kids, I began to feel the anxiety creeping in. I think you know the kind of anxiety I’m talking about: worry about falling behind on work, concern that my lack… Read More »
In theory, quality measurement and reporting generally benefits patients and their families, as (PDF link) public data on quality increases transparency and provider accountability. It also may benefit providers as a tool for quality assurance and improvement; however, the evidence does not always provide a clear picture. Unique challenges exist for patients receiving home care… Read More »
In 2014 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in every 68 children have autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Consequently, there is a lot of discussion regarding potential causes of autism. However, for this post, I wanted to move away from this more commonly discussed topic and focus instead on how assistive technology (specifically iPads) are being… Read More »
Since January 2013, most private insurance plans have been required to cover contraceptive services without patient cost-sharing. While health insurance plans have covered some methods of contraception with low cost-sharing, not all plans or methods have been covered equally. This is particularly the case of long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) methods, intrauterine devices (IUDs) and implants,… Read More »
About one-quarter of all children born in the United States today are of Latino origin. Over the last twenty years, the under-18 US Latino population has grown rapidly – a result of both immigration and higher fertility rates among Latino adults relative to other groups. The Latino population more than doubled in 9 states between 2000 and… Read More »
Nobody can deny that the market for consumer wearable devices (such as Fitbit and Jawbone) is booming. In 2015, a research firm estimated the number of activity trackers sold in the US to be over 13 million. Personally, I followed the fitness tracker trend and bought a Fitbit for both my husband and father as… Read More »
Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) seeks to compare alternative treatments and ways to deliver healthcare to inform healthcare decisions. It can provide evidence of the harms, benefits, and effectiveness of different treatment options. As the number of studies in CER continues to grow, it is vitally important that the types of bias that exist as a function of the study design be explained. In a Medical Care article published in April, Dr. Sebastien Haneuse lays out definitions and examples of selection bias and confounding bias in CER, with a particular emphasis on distinguishing between the two.