Patients who are frequently hospitalized account for a disproportionate amount of health care spending in the United States. Working with a $6.1 million grant, a new University of Chicago Medicine program will test whether an updated version of the traditional general practitioner can reduce spending while also improving care for these patients.
Culture
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A team of archaeologists led by Brown University's Stephen Houston has uncovered a pyramid, part of the Maya archaeological site at El Zotz, Guatemala. The ornately decorated structure is topped by a temple covered in a series of masks depicting different phases of the sun, as well as deeply modeled and vibrantly painted stucco throughout.
(Washington) – "We know that the current Medicare payment system is not serving the needs of patients, physicians or taxpayers," David L. Bronson, MD, FACP, president of the American College of Physicians (ACP), today told the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Health. "Congress needs to do its part by repealing the SGR, once and for all. But the medical profession needs to do its part by leading the adoption of innovative models to align payment policies with the value of care provided to patients."
A quarter of patients admitted to Scottish intensive care units have alcohol problems and the majority of those have chronic alcohol disease, with particular problems among men and younger people.
Those are key findings of a survey of all 24 Scottish intensive care units, carried out by the Scottish Intensive Care Audit Group and published online early by Anaesthesia, ahead of inclusion in an issue.
Researchers from Austria have determined that patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and their doctors differ on perception of RA disease activity. The study now available in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and published by Wiley, reports that RA patients cite joint pain as the reason for their perception of a change in their disease activity. Rheumatologists, however, stressed joint swelling as the major determinant for their perception of change in RA disease activity.
Fans of Facebook hate groups, while using new media to target President Obama and his family, are relying heavily on old stereotypes of blacks as animalist, evil or shiftless — including depictions of the President as a chimp or sporting a bandana and a mouth full of gold teeth, according to a Baylor University study.
A community-based nursing program delivered in collaboration with existing health care services is more effective in reducing the number of older people dying from chronic illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, than usual care according to a study by US researchers published in this week's PLoS Medicine.
A increasingly used type of HIV study which involves switching patients on one type of antiretroviral therapy (ART) to another, to see whether the new drug is as good as the at preventing replication of the HIV virus, may be unethical, according to a new Essay published in this week's PLoS Medicine.
p>Clinicians and laboratory professionals often rely on manufacturers' package inserts to assess the accuracy of diagnostic medical tests. However, package inserts frequently greatly overstate such tests' accuracy, according to a case study of package inserts for tuberculosis (TB), which is published in the July 2012 Journal of Clinical Microbiology.
As part of the Affordable Care Act, hospitals and medical centers are required to report their quality-of-care and risk-standardized outcomes for stroke and other common medical conditions. But reporting models for mortality that don't consider stroke severity may unfairly skew these results.
Now, A UCLA-led national study has found that when reporting on 30-day mortality rates for Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized with acute stroke, using a model that adjusts for stroke severity completely alters performance outcomes and rankings for many hospitals.
CHICAGO – Adding stroke severity to a hospital 30-day mortality model based on claims data for Medicare beneficiaries with acute ischemic stroke was associated with improvement in predicting the risk of death at 30 days and changes in performance ranking regarding mortality for a considerable proportion of hospitals, according to a study in the July 18 issue of JAMA.
CHICAGO – Physicians tend to share patients with colleagues who have similar personal traits and practice styles, and there is substantial variation in physician network characteristics across geographic areas, according to a study in the July 18 issue of JAMA.
CHICAGO – Among patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (MS), treatment with the widely-prescribed drug to treat MS, interferon beta, was not associated with less progression of disability, according to a study in the July 18 issue of JAMA.
Fewer people died or needed expensive long-term care when their physicians focused on the top risk factors for stroke and dementia, according to research reported in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA). dementia
The primary care doctors in the German study focused on high blood pressure, smoking, high cholesterol, diabetes, irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) and depression. The researchers found that during a five-year period, the need for long-term care was cut 10 percent in women and 9.6 percent in men.
BOSTON – A new way of mapping how physicians share patients provides opportunities for improving the quality of medical care and organizing the nature of care delivery, according to researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.