Care Delivery
Trustee Talking Points
Trustee Talking Points
Performance data give Medicare and other payers the ability to measure the value of health services.
Value-based competition will thoroughly disrupt health care markets and will favor innovative players.
Providers will need to reconsider what…
Our Obesity Problem
36.5% of American adults are obese.
Here’s how it breaks down by age.
Trustee Talking Points
Trustee Talking Points
Hospital leaders — executives and trustees — must pay attention to how facilities affect infection control and patient safety.
Medicare and insurers are tying reimbursement to measures on health care-associated…
Health care organizations live or die based on the quality of the data their leaders use to make strategic, business and clinical decisions.
And that data — from hospital-acquired infection rates and patient satisfaction scores, to Medicare reimbursement levels — come from dozens of disparate…
Trustee Talking Points
Trustee Talking Points
Cost is driving a rise in ambulatory care and a proliferation of outpatient settings.
Technology enables these facilities to deliver care across multiple settings.
Roughly eight models of ambulatory sites have emerged.
Differences between these…
Infant mortality hits record low
The U.S. mortality rate fell 2.3% in 2014, to a record low 582.1 deaths per 100,000 live births. The drop was led by a 13.5% decline in deaths from respiratory illness.
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid. These two programs (including state funding) represent 37 cents of every dollar spent on health care in the United States. There are more than 54 million Medicare beneficiaries and 64 million Americans on Medicaid.
As one of the…
Trustee Talking Points
Trustee Talking Points
Sepsis is a leading cause of death and the most expensive condition treated in hospitals.
Nearly half of patients who die in the hospital have sepsis.
Many hospitals have given sepsis control less attention than other types of patient harm.…
Hospitals are making “substantial progress in improving safety,” according to an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality report that found a 17 percent decline in hospital-acquired conditions from 2010 to 2014. That saved 87,000 lives and nearly $20 billion in health costs. HACs include adverse…
The number of new cases of diabetes diagnosed in the United States declined significantly from 2009 to 2014 after steadily rising for 25 years, according to data released in December by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The country recorded 1.4 million new cases in 2014, down from 1.7…