Two reports by addiction researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the National Institute on Drug Abuse show a drastic shift in prescribing patterns impacting the magnitude of opioid substance abuse in America. The reports, published in JAMA, recommend a comprehensive effort to reduce public health risks while improving patient care, including better training for prescribers, pain ...

For more than 5 million Americans with heart failure, a critical step to better health is taking the medications they are prescribed. But many patients fail to do so, putting themselves at greater risk of hospitalization and even death. To date, studies have not fully answered why patients fall short when it comes to taking heart medicine. In a study appearing in the April issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, ...

The United States Congress will soon be facing another budget showdown as their sixth continuing resolution expires on April 8, 2011. While the entire government has been without permanent appropriations for nearly six months, the House Republicans and Senate Democrats continue to remain far apart on resolving the fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget. ...

Your profession needs you to take action NOW to ask your legislators to co-sponsor psychology's Medicare "physician" definition inclusion bills and end inappropriate physician supervision requirements that hinder the delivery of psychological services. It is time to take action now. ...

Approximately five percent of prescriptions submitted by CVS Caremark Pharmacy Benefit Management (PBM) members in a 30-day period during 2009 included a "dispense as written" (DAW) designation. This practice – whereby doctors or patients demand the dispensing of a specific brand-name drug and not a generic alternative – costs the health care system up to $7.7 billion annually, according to a new study by r ...

Expansion of health care coverage mandated by health reform will push demand for primary care providers sharply upward, and thousands of new physicians are necessary to accommodate the increase, a new study finds. The study appears in the latest issue of the journal The Milbank Quarterly. The publisher made the original study available for free for unknown length of time; check the end of this report for a ...

United States community hospitals billed insurance companies and federal and state programs $1.2 trillion in 2008 for inpatient care, according to the latest news and numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. This represents a 28 percent increase over the $900 billion, adjusted for inflation, billed in 2004. Check the end of this report for a link to download the original statistical brie ...

Health care professionals make daily calculated decisions to not alert their colleagues when a safety tool signals potential harm to a patient, according to a new study of 6,500 nurses and nurse managers released March 22 during a national briefing in Philadelphia. Over the past decade, the health care community has developed safety tools to prevent communication errors and breakdowns, such as handoff proto ...

Patients who have been hurt in car or bike crashes, been shot or stabbed, or suffered other injuries are more likely to live if they arrive at the hospital on the weekend than during the week, according to new University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine research published in the March 21 issue of Archives of Surgery. The findings, which also showed that trauma patients who present to the hospital on weekn ...

A new study in the journal Health Services Research shows that diabetes patients who do a better job of taking their medication have slightly lower health care costs. However, “it’s not a huge effect,” said lead investigator Bruce Stuart, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy in Baltimore. ...