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The first for-profit insurance company approved to offer government-subsidized coverage under Massachusetts’ health reform has dangerously restricted access to primary care, according to data reported in Thursday’s (Aug. 5) New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers say the findings raise troubling concerns about the Obama administration’s new health law, which is modeled after the Massachusetts plan.
Transforming the U.S. health care system from paper-based to electronic-based may improve health care quality and reduce costs, but a new study by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) suggests that goal is far off. The adoption of basic or comprehensive electronic health records (EHR) by U.S. hospitals increased modestly from 8.7% in 2008 to 11.9% in 2009, but only 2% of hospitals met the federal “meaningful use” standard needed to qualify for government financial incentives.
This week’s new workshops and conference announcements for healthcare professionals include events presented by Fort Worth Area Psychological Association, American Association for Cancer Research, American College of Forensic Examiners, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and John Demos. Please visit the Event Calendar for more detailed information.
If you want to know how people become addicted and why they keep using drugs, ask the people who are addicted. Thirty-one of 75 patients hospitalized for opioid detoxification told University at Buffalo physicians they first got hooked on drugs legitimately prescribed for pain. Another 24 began with a friend’s left-over prescription pills or pilfered from a parent’s medicine cabinet. The remaining 20 patients said they got hooked on street drugs. Results of the study appear in the current issue of Journal of Addiction Medicine.
On July 30th I sent you an information alert about the 2011 Medicare fee schedule proposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The proposed fee schedule included some expected reimbursement cuts to all provider services related to the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula and changes to the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI). However, an additional cut due to revisions to the medical economic index (MEI), while generally impacting all provider services across the board, will have a significant impact on psychological and other mental health services. Please read on for a specific Call To Action for Mental Health Professionals.
The pharmaceutical industry is a “market for lemons,” a market in which the seller knows much more than the buyer about the product and can profit from selling products less effective and less safe than consumers are led to believe, according to an analysis by sociologist Donald Light that will be presented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. Light is a professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
Adverse drug events, such as dizziness or confusion occur in an estimated 40 percent of all hospital patients and can be the result of inappropriate medications being ordered. Not surprisingly, elderly individuals are particularly vulnerable to these adverse events, which not only result in longer hospitalizations, but can also pose a threat of serious complications and even death.
BMED Report recently added a new Event Calendar. This provides announcements of upcoming national and international training opportunities for healthcare professionals that include continuing education, workshops, and conferences. The goal is to provide our readers will a valuable service and to give healthcare organizations an inexpensive way to announce their events to a large audience – and, not to mention, an unobtrusive and hopefully meaningful way to help fund website operations without aggravating readers with annoying in-your-face “pop up ads.”
Regardless of culture, language, era, or individual artist, the arts consistently depict depression using darkness. Scientific findings now lend empirical support to this representation of depression that everything looks gray when you feel blue. Researchers at the University of Freiburg in Germany showed previously that people with depression have difficulty detecting black-and-white contrast differences.
More than one-third of U.S. physicians responding to a survey did not agree that physicians should always report colleagues who are incompetent or impaired by conditions such as substance abuse or mental health disorders. The report from the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), published in the July 14 Journal of the American Medical Association, also finds that substantial numbers of physicians feel unprepared to report or otherwise deal with impaired or incompetent colleagues.
The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) is a brief psychological screening instrument designed to measure symptoms of depression in primary care settings. Like the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Inventory, Big Five Inventory, and Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale previously reviewed, the PHQ-9 is available to healthcare providers completely free of charge. Pfizer Inc., the legal copyright holder, explicitly states that “no permission [is] required to reproduce, translate, display or distribute [the PHQ-9].” Check the end of this report to download the PHQ-9.
Pay-for-performance is an increasingly popular approach to improving health care quality. But the planned nationwide implementation of institutional bonuses mandated under federal health care reform threatens to act as a “reverse Robin Hood,” potentially causing hospitals in less-advantaged regions to lose funds to health care facilities in more affluent areas of the country, according to a study published in the academic journal PLoS Medicine. Check the end of this report to download the original open access article.
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