The Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in recent months have delivered grim statistics on military and veteran suicides. In a report earlier this year, the VA announced veterans committed suicide at a rate of 22 per day in 2010. Active-duty military suicides reached...
Through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, certain healthcare providers – including most physicians and hospitals – may be eligible for incentive payments if they follow guidelines regarding implementation and active use of electronic health record (EHR) systems. In order to receive these incentive...
A painful fact about the U.S. health system is that roughly one third of health costs and spending are wasted. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that wasted health spending could reach from about $500 billion to almost $1 trillion each year. And...
Much of the health information technology (HIT) today promotes patient communication to improve care and potentially lower costs. Some examples are interactive preventive health records (IPHR), e-prescribing, and electronic health records (EHR).
Emerging telehealth technologies, however, take it a step further. Telehealth allows physicians and other providers not only to...
Prevention and wellness care are widely recognized as means to reduce health costs and spending, while also improving outcomes for patients. Preventive services typically include screenings for diseases, such as cancer, or harmful conditions, such as obesity. They also include immunizations. For example: someone gets a flu shot costing...
The U.S. Military Health System, with a budget of $48.7 billion in FY 2013, provides medical benefits to 9.7 million active duty servicemembers, National Guard and Reserve members, retirees, and dependents.
Specifically, the Military Health System provides services through Department of Defense (DOD) medical treatment facilities (MTFs) – 56 hospitals and...
A common story during the health reform debate was that of an uninsured person who went to the hospital for treatment and left behind a mountain of unpaid medical bills. Uninsured and under-insured patients account for billions of dollars in uncompensated health care each year, which reached a total $57.4...
Communication with patients is at the heart of new primary care tools and models that improve outcomes and lower costs, such as patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) and interactive preventive health records (IPHR). Often, communication means electronic communication, and is part of efforts by Medicare, Medicaid, and private health plans to...
By making hospital quality of care information public, the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) program is designed to help patients make informed decisions and encourage hospitals and physicians to improve the quality of inpatient care. Under the Hospital IQR program, hospitals submit clinical quality data to the Centers for Medicare...
Medicaid accounts for the largest share of state budgets and is growing still. Since fiscal year 2010, state Medicaid spending nationwide grew from 22.2 percent to about 24 percent of the average state budget, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO). Since the recession began in...
