Physicians and hospitals are being evaluated on myriad quality metrics, with results increasingly tied to financial penalties or bonuses. But payers, providers, and patients don’t always agree on what “quality” means, and there is no official set of standards. In a recent Wall Street...
As hospitals acquire more physician offices, patients are often paying more, not less, for their care. At the heart of the disparity is Medicare’s policy of paying one price to independent physicians and another to physicians who work for large health systems—even if they are performing the...
Unplanned hospital readmissions for patients following surgery are primarily due to new surgical complications rather than the worsening of patients’ previous medical issues, according to a study published in the Feb. 3 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)....
Only a handful of several community groups that received federal reimbursements for curbing preventable readmissions have delivered better results than programs that were not part of the initiative, according to partial results revealed in a CMS report. The results, released this month, analyzed...
