HLAC Health News

The American healthcare system overspends by $200 billion, 8% of its healthcare budget, because medications are not being used responsibly by doctors and patients every year, says a new report issued by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

Mobile health technology has substantial potential for improving access to health care in the developing world and in remote regions of developed countries, states an article in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Currently, readmissions for Medicare patients alone cost $26 billion annually. About $17 billion of that could be avoided if patients received the right care from the start, according to a February 2013 report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began cutting one percent of reimbursements for 30-day readmissions among Medicare patients. That penalty is expected to increase to two percent in 2014 and three percent in 2015.

While there exist numerous published studies purporting to demonstrate positive results from DAT [dolphin-assisted therapy], none so far has controlled for feel-good and placebo effects. Most don't even include a minimal control group, which would provide some measure of whether even general short-term feel-good effects are due to the dolphin or to other salient factors, such as being in the water, being given conventional tasks, getting increased attention from others, and so forth.

Continued downward pressure is expected for the health sector, mainly because of aggressive and creative steps taken by employers, elements of the ACA (Affordable Care Act), and new locations and models for delivering care.

"These findings are an important step in understanding where primary care practices and medical home programs can be most effective in making changes to enhance access."

Large multicenter clinical trials conducted in Germany7-10 and the United States11 consistently revealed that verum (or true) acupuncture and sham acupuncture treatments are no different in decreasing pain levels across multiple chronic pain disorders: migraine, tension headache, low back pain, and osteoarthritis of the knee.

"These findings suggest that high teaching intensity and safety-net institutions may be disproportionately affected by recent and upcoming changes in hospital payment models."

The "autism biomed movement is almost all pseudoscience and quackery and ... much of it 'amounts to uncontrolled experimentation on children.'"

No, these two women were, as far as I can tell, offered help but refused it because it was standard conventional therapy. From what I can tell from various blog and Internet articles, they appear to have subjected Alex to biomedical quackery and were unhappy that if Alex were transferred to a psychiatric hospital's long-term care ward he would no longer be able to receive "autism biomed" treatments. Time and investigation by the authorities will tell if that was the case.

Less than 25% of newly qualified doctors go into primary care, and just 4.8% move into rural areas, the authors added. This serious problem will only get worse unless some fundamental changes are introduced.

The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Questions to Ask Your Doctor campaign is based on the idea that doctors "know a lot about a lot of things, but they don't always know everything about you or what is best for you." The website offers a list of 10 general questions you should ask, along with questions to ask before, during, and after appointments. It also has an interactive page that lets you build your own list of questions. The independent, nonprofit Joint Commission accredits more than 20,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States. Its Speak Up Initiatives offer free brochures and videos to help make the most out of visits to the doctor.

[Press release]