Tag Archives: outcomes

Who gets the value in value-based care?

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About Joseph Burns

Joseph Burns (@jburns18), a Massachusetts-based independent journalist, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health insurance. He welcomes questions and suggestions on insurance resources and tip sheets at joseph@healthjournalism.org.

Photo: Pictures of Money via Flickr

Last year on this blog, I asked a rhetorical question: Is value-based care a fad? I did not expect to get an answer. But in June I hosted a webcast on this topic and learned that value-based care is not a fad and that what health insurers and health care administrators call value-based care rarely delivers any actual value to patients or consumers.

Instead, when health insurers, physicians, and hospital and health system executives use the term “value-based care,” they most often mean value-based payment. Continue reading →

New data resource on NSQIP database can inform coverage of relevant medical studies

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About Tara Haelle

Tara Haelle (@TaraHaelle) is AHCJ's medical studies core topic leader, guiding journalists through the jargon-filled shorthand of science and research and enabling them to translate the evidence into accurate information.

More than 1,500 peer-reviewed studies have relied on a surgical database known as the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP), or its pediatric counterpart, the NSQIP-P.

These databases, set up by the American College of Surgeons, offer extraordinarily granular information about clinical variables and outcomes (as well as demographic information) for a wide range of surgical procedures. Continue reading →

New tip sheet expands on HealthNewsReview.org criteria

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About Tara Haelle

Tara Haelle (@TaraHaelle) is AHCJ's medical studies core topic leader, guiding journalists through the jargon-filled shorthand of science and research and enabling them to translate the evidence into accurate information.

The first AHCJ conference I ever attended was in 2011 in Philadelphia. I had only recently learned about the organization and knew very little about it. I’d signed up for a field trip, but I had brought my 8-month-old with me and was up late the night before, so overslept and missed it.

When I actually got to the conference (my aunt watched my son), I caught the second half of a Thursday workshop with Ivan Oransky, M.D., (now AHCJ’s president) and Gary Schwitzer of HealthNewsReview.org on how to understand and responsibly report on medical studies. It was the session I would eventually end up leading myself years later. Continue reading →

Surprising conclusions in a study of racial, socioeconomic disparities in U.S. hospitals

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About Emily Willingham

Emily Willingham (@ejwillingham) is AHCJ's core topic leader on the social determinants of health. She is a science journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and Forbes, among others, and co-author of "The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Guide to Your Child's First Four Years."

Racial and socioeconomic disparities in outcomes among hospitalized patients?

Don’t blame the hospitals, say the authors of this JAMA Network Open study. They looked at factors that might underlie known divergences in health outcomes based on socioeconomic status and race or ethnicity, with a focus on heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia. Their findings suggest that hospitals perform similarly across socioeconomic and ethnic groups but that something “systemic” must explain the differences among these populations. Continue reading →

U.S. ranks worse in elder care vs. other wealthy nations

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About Liz Seegert

Liz Seegert (@lseegert), is AHCJ’s topic editor on aging. Her work has appeared in NextAvenue.com, Journal of Active Aging, Cancer Today, Kaiser Health News, the Connecticut Health I-Team and other outlets. She is a senior fellow at the Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement at George Washington University and co-produces the HealthCetera podcast.

How does the U.S. health system for older adults stack up when compared with those of 10 other wealthy countries?

Pretty poorly, according to a new international survey. Medicare beneficiaries tend to be sicker and forego care more often due to costs than their counterparts in Europe and Canada. Continue reading →

Patient outcomes are among the most overlooked stories in health care

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About Joseph Burns

Joseph Burns (@jburns18), a Massachusetts-based independent journalist, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health insurance. He welcomes questions and suggestions on insurance resources and tip sheets at joseph@healthjournalism.org.

If you saw our November webcast on how consumers and payers can evaluate physician quality, you know that we began with a quote from Atul Gawande, M.D., about patient outcomes.

A professor of health policy and management at Harvard University and a prolific and gifted writer, Gawande is the best-selling author of “Being Mortal” and “The Checklist Manifesto.” He’s also a contributor for The New Yorker and other publications, writing about cardiologists in McAllen, Texas, super utilizers in New Jersey, and unnecessary care nationwide.

In short, he’s darn good at what we do. Continue reading →