Shorter Lives, Poorer Health in the US: New IOM report

From the National Academies Press: The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income …

Health care and profits, a poor mix

From the New York Times: Thirty years ago, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered an interesting pattern in the use of sedatives at nursing homes in the south of the state. Patients entering church-affiliated nonprofit homes were prescribed drugs roughly as often as those entering …

The Well quiz: Cutting health costs

The New York Times Well blog  has a quiz, along with links to the Institute of Medicine report on waste in the American health care system. How well did you do?

Nurse practitioners and primary care

Both Health Affairs and the New York Times (in the Fixes blog) are talking about a greater use of nurse practitioners in health care. From the Health Affairs blog: A new Health Policy Brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation examines policy proposals that would allow nurse practitioners to practice to their full potential--and the …

Evaluation of the Lovell Federal Health Care Center Merger: Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations – New from NAP

From the National Academies Press: The 2010 opening of the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center (FHCC) created a joint entity between the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that replaced two separate centers in North Chicago. VA and DoD leaders envisioned a state-of-the-art facility that would deliver …

Making health data public

Some interesting stories on opening up data.  First, from NPR's Shots blog, How Do Public Data About Heart Attack Treatment Change It?: Measurement has long been a cornerstone of quality improvement, whether it's on the factory floor or the hospital ward. And making the quality scores of doctors and hospitals publicly available is central to …

Quality improvement interventions to address health care disparities

From the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ): AHRQ’s Vanderbilt University Evidence-based Practice Center researchers led by Melissa L. McPheeters, Ph.D., found that, as a whole, quality interventions to reduce health care disparities have not been shown to be effective, although they did find a few studies showing that quality improvement interventions affected health …

Public reporting as a quality improvement strategy

From AHRQ: In 2004, AHRQ launched a collection of evidence reports, Closing the Quality Gap: A Critical Analysis of Quality Improvement Strategies, to bring data to bear on quality improvement opportunities. These reports summarized the evidence on quality improvement strategies related to chronic conditions, practice areas, and cross-cutting priorities. This evidence report is part of a …

AHRQ Quality Indicators™ toolkit for hospitals

The AHRQ Quality Indicators™ Toolkit for Hospitals is a free set of tools designed to support hospitals in assessing and improving the quality and safety of care they provide: http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/qitoolkit. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Quality Indicators (QIs) are measures of hospital quality and safety drawn from readily available hospital inpatient administrative data. …

Video ethnography for quality improvement in health care

In this month's issue of Health Affairs, Esther B. Neuwirth, Jim Bellows, Ana H. Jackson, and Patricia M. Price describe how Kaiser Permanente uses "video to capture interviews with—and observations of—patients and caregivers, identify patient-centered improvement opportunities, and communicate them effectively to clinical and administrative leaders and front-line staff." How Kaiser Permanente Uses Video Ethnography Of …