Most hospitals follow established practice guidelines for surgery involving Medicare beneficiaries with cancer, but in some cases their practice patterns diverge from the guidelines, according to a report published Online First today by Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. According to background information in the article, health care quality has emerged as an important concern in the Un ...

Employees of private-sector companies contributed up to 121 percent more in 2009 for their yearly share of their employer-sponsored health insurance coverage than they did in 2001, according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. By comparison, the total average annual premium for employer-sponsored health plans, which includes both the cost to the worker and to ...

Health insurance is not protecting Arizonans from having problems paying medical bills, and having bill problems is keeping families from getting needed medical care and prescription medicines, a new study has found. According to a study published online June 16, 2011, by the American Journal of Public Health, after taking age, income and health status into account, simply being insured does not lower the o ...

Sixty-six percent of publicly-insured children were unable to get a doctor’s appointment for medical conditions requiring outpatient specialty care including diabetes and seizures, while children with identical symptoms and private insurance were turned away only 11 percent of the time, according to an audit study of 273 specialty physician practices in Cook County, Ill. conducted by researchers from the Pe ...

With an increased emphasis on grading hospitals and a push to withhold payments from hospitals who do not meet certain standards, two Johns Hopkins researchers argue that more attention needs to be paid to the quality of the measurement tools used to praise and punish. The science of outcomes reporting is young and lags behind the desire to publically report adverse medical outcomes, write Elliott R. Haut, ...

In an examination of trends of malpractice claims, there has been a greater decline in the rate of paid claims for inpatient settings than outpatient settings, and in 2009, the number of malpractice claims for events resulting in paid malpractice claims in outpatient and inpatient settings were similar, according to a study in the June 15 issue of JAMA [1]. ...

Using the Screening Tool of Older Persons’ potentially inappropriate Prescriptions (STOPP) criteria was associated with identification of adverse drug events in older patients, according to a report in the June issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The article is part of the journal’s Less Is More series. ...

A shift toward more conservative medication-prescribing practices would serve patients better, according to a review article published Online First today by Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The article is part of the journal’s Less Is More series. ...

Fewer than half of primary care physicians for adults talk to their patients about diet, exercise, and weight management consistently, while pediatricians are somewhat more likely to do so, according to two new studies. These findings come from two National Cancer Institute surveys of family physicians, internists, obstetrician/gynecologists, and pediatricians. Both studies appear online and in the July iss ...

A new national study shows that from 1998 to 2008 (the most recent year with available figures) substance abuse treatment admissions among those 12 and older related to the abuse of benzodiazepine drugs rose from 22,400 in 1998 to approximately 60,200 in 2008. The report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) shows that while benzodiazepine related admissions represented o ...