Newly named to run the federal agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid, which pay almost half of the country’s health care tab, Berwick has great and practical insight into health care’s problems and how to fix them.
July 26, 2010
July 19, 2010
Oops! Big Fix for Health Care Onces Again Leaves Patients Out of the Equation
This week’s blog discusses the concept of a “medical home,” one of the approaches to improving health care that makes the news. It has great promise, but a recent study shows that it often fails to consider the patient’s needs.
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July 12, 2010
Want to Know What Treatments Work Best if You’re Sick or Injured? Who Wouldn’t?
This week’s blog looks at Comparative Effectiveness Research, a part of health reform variously hailed as salvation and as damnation by different politicians. CER is intended to answer the first question above: what treatments work best.
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July 5, 2010
June 28, 2010
Health Care as Greek Tragedy: Inevitable Misfortune?
A typical Greek tragedy features “a heroic individual who is often overcome by the very obstacles he is struggling to remove.” (from The Free Dictionary online) Health care often looks like one big Greek tragedy.
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June 21, 2010
Can Being in the Hospital Drive You Crazy?
Hospitalized patients, particularly the elderly, often lose touch with reality. Said another way, about one-third to two-thirds of older hospitalized patients become insane while in the hospital. They start hallucinating, and the hallucinations tend to be terrifying. Those who experience delirium end up much worse off than equally sick patients who don’t. That is, delirium often causes severe and permanent damage, even if people return to sanity later.
In this week’s blog, I discuss this issue. Primary sources include Pam Belluck, “Hallucinations in Hospital Pose Risk to the Elderly,” New York Times, 20 June 2010 and E. Wesley Ely, “ICU Delirium Epidemiology, Monitoring & Management,” Vanderbilt University, 2006
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June 14, 2010
June 7, 2010
Is Your Doctor Santa Claus?
After reading new research about the beliefs people have about health care, I’ve concluded that there are a lot of similarities between those beliefs and beliefs in Santa Claus. This week’s blog will highlight some of these.
The research in question is reported in Health Affairs, posted online 03 June 2010, titled “Evidence That Consumers Are Skeptical About Evidence-Based Health Care,” by Kristin L. Carman, Maureen Maurer, Jill Mathews Yegian, Pamela Dardess, Jeanne McGee, Mark Evers and Karen O. Marlo.
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May 31, 2010
Medical Tests: False Sense of Security?
| You may get a false sense of security from having a medical test. This week’s blog highlights some gaps in the testing process so that you know what pitfalls to watch out for. |
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May 24, 2010
Don Berwick
| Don Berwick is President Obama’s choice to run Medicare and Medicaid, which collectively pay for about half of the health care in the U.S. A few comments by or about Dr. Berwick follow. |
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