Nov 13, 2014 | Health Navigator
The Forbes article noted “If you didn’t know it, the key intent of Affordable Care Act is to shift medical care from fee-for-service to fee-for-quality.”
“For too long, hospitals have gorged on referrals into their systems and walk-ins to their emergency rooms. But besides electronic medical records—a low hanging fruit–hospitals are hailed widely as being inefficient and sloppy. But the game changes when hospitals start getting paid for how many people they heal, not how many people they process. Think: outcomes not transactions.”
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Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Health Navigator
The New York Times article noted “Restricting consumers to a fixed network of doctors and hospitals, called in-network coverage, helps keep costs down, and for the first year, none of the 16 insurance companies in New York’s exchange deviated from that model.”
“Advocates for consumers had lobbied hard for out-of-network coverage, saying that some patients needed more choices, particularly since the networks are being kept small to further reduce costs. Under the current in-network system, someone who lives part of the year out of state, or a student at a college out of state, are not covered while they are away, except for emergency care.”
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Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Health Navigator
“Though the views were spectacular, the cardiac arrest team could not get there as quickly as it could to the regular wards.”
The New York Times article asked the questions “What is going on here? Is This a Hospital or a Hotel?”
“The Henry Ford health system in Michigan caused a stir after it hired a hotel industry executive, Gerard van Grinsven of the Ritz-Carlton Group, in 2006 to run its new hospital, Henry Ford West Bloomfield. There are some medical arguments for the trend — private rooms, for example, could lower infection rates and allow patients more rest as they heal. But the main reason for the largess is marketing.”
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Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Health Navigator
“Every year between 210,000 and 440,000 Americans die as a result of medical errors and other preventable harm at hospitals, according to researchers.”
These numbers are equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing every day with no survivors. Based on these figures, medical errors could be considered the third-leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease (more than 590,000 a year) and cancer (more than 570,000 a year).
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Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Health Navigator
New models of clinical practice are being used in the “doctor’s office.”
A Wall Street Journal article noted: “An increasing number of practices are scrapping the traditional one-on-one doctor-patient relationship. Instead, patients are receiving care from a group of health professionals who divide up responsibilities that once would have largely been handled by the doctor in charge. While the supervising doctor still directly oversees patient care, other medical professionals—nurse practitioners, physician assistants and clinical pharmacists—are performing more functions. These include adjusting medication dosage, ensuring that patients receive tests and helping them to manage chronic diseases.”
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The Forbes article noted “If you didn’t know it, the key intent of Affordable Care Act is to shift medical care from fee-for-service to fee-for-quality.”
