Health Affairs

In June of 2011, I flew to Washington, D.C. to say good-bye to my friend, Alvin.  I wanted to be there with him and his family during his peaceful passage from this life.  Unfortunately, his end was not peaceful.  It was a nightmare because he, like too many patients being transferred from one level of [...]

Despite more than a decade of national focus on patient safety, medical errors and other adverse events occur in one-third of hospital admissions — as much as ten times more than some previous estimates have indicated, according to the most-read Health Affairs article published in 2011. The study, by David Classen and coauthors, appeared in [...]

As Don Berwick ends his tenure as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a Health Affairs Web First article discusses what he has meant to the agency and to the American health care system. Author Harris Meyer also looks at the future of the agency under Marilyn Tavenner, Berwick’s principal deputy who [...]

Editor’s note: See additional posts on the Medicare Shared Savings Program Final Rule  and related delivery system and payment reform initiatives by Debra Ness and William Kramer, Lawrence Casalino and Stephen Shortell,  Douglas Hastings, and Mark McClellan and Elliott Fisher. Innovation has revolutionized medicine.  Technology enables us to peer into the depths of the human body to [...]

This Friday, Oct. 14, 2011, a working meeting of innovators, policy and health IT experts, health care providers, patient organizations, technology companies, and government agencies will convene in Washington to assess progress in improving transitions in care and prioritize how the increasing availability of health IT can address some of the most intractable challenges related [...]

A new national study of small and medium-size physician practices shows that this group is not using many of the organized care processes of the patient-centered medical home model of health system reform included in the Affordable Care Act of 2010. The study by Diane Rittenhouse of the University of California-San Francisco and coauthors was [...]

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Rita Redberg MD, a cardiologist and Chief Editor of Archives of Internal Medicine, described the American health system’s penchant for delivering high volumes of “procedures and devices [to] patients who get no benefit and incur risks from them.” The culprit, of course, is fee-for-service reimbursement, used by Medicare, Medicaid and commercial [...]

Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s regulatory czar, announced last week that the administration intends to repeal cost-increasing, unnecessary regulations from 30 different agencies. If the administration is serious in this effort, a good place to start is with a web of regulations that are preventing life saving drugs from reaching the patients who need them. Doctors [...]

Suppose you need to drive from Boston to San Francisco, about 3200 miles, over the next 7 days.  At an average speed limit of 55 mph you could accomplish this by driving about 10 hours a day, including stops for rest and food breaks; a grueling but not impossible journey. Now suppose that gas stations [...]

Health Affairs today adds a new Medical Education recording to its free collection of Narrative Matters essays on iTunes U. The account was written by Fitzhugh Mullan, a physician and clinical professor of pediatrics and public health at the George Washington University and the original editor of the “Narrative Matters” section. The essay, “Me And [...]

The latest study, out last week, shows one in three patients in the hospital may experience a medical error—an incidence almost ten times higher than previously assumed.  Health care costs still make up approximately 17 percent of GDP—about $2.5 trillion dollars a year—and are rising three times faster than inflation.  Unfortunately, it continues to be [...]

A new Health Policy Brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation examines the ongoing need to improve the quality and safety of health care provided in the United States. Despite some progress toward goals set a decade ago following two landmark Institute of Medicine studies, the nation faces considerable challenges in making [...]

In announcing a major new patient safety and quality initiative, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen  Sebelius today highlighted a study in the April 2011 issue of Health Affairs, titled “Still Crossing The Quality Chasm.” “Just last week, a report released in Health Affairs found that errors or adverse events occur in nearly one out [...]

Safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable health care:  These should be the core aims of the US health care system, according the Institute of Medicine’s 2001 report, Crossing the Quality Chasm.  A decade later, despite a major national focus on patient safety, gaps in quality and safety remain. Some leading health systems are making [...]

Despite more than a decade of national focus on patient safety, medical errors and other adverse events occur in one-third of hospital admissions—as much as ten times more than some previous estimates have indicated, according to authors of a new study in the April issue of Health Affairs. The April issue is funded by the [...]

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.  [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]