Editor's Note The Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness has teamed up with the American College of Surgeons (ACS) to develop a value-based measurement program for hospitals and surgical practices. The program, “Transforming Healthcare Resources to Increase Value and Efficiency [ACS THRIVE],” will be tested at 10 to…

Read More

Editor's Note In this study, researchers developed service- and surgeon-specific statistical models using linear regression and machine learning to predict case-time duration at a large academic medical center. Results showed: The machine-learning algorithm had the highest predictive capability. The surgeon-specific was superior to the service-specific model, with higher accuracies and…

Read More

Editor's Note Hospital network participation was not associated with improvements in surgical outcomes or Medicare expenditures, compared with hospitals not in a network, this study finds. In this analysis of nearly 2 million Medicare beneficiaries having general, vascular, cardiac, or orthopedic surgery between 2007 and 2014 at network (1,868) or…

Read More

Editor's Note House Leaders will vote the week of July 15 on a measure to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s 40% tax on high-cost healthcare insurance plans, the July 12 Bloomberg Tax reports. The measure is expected to have wide bipartisan support. Democrat Rep Joe Courtney of Connecticut is the…

Read More

Editor's Note Residing in a disadvantaged neighborhood in Maryland and being discharged from a hospital serving a large proportion of disadvantaged neighborhoods were independently associated with increased risk of readmission in this study. 2015 data from Maryland hospitals showed a 14.1% 30-day readmission rate for patients living in neighborhoods in…

Read More

Editor's Note Though hospitals still expect to increase their supply purchases from Amazon in the next 3 years, the percentage of respondents to a UBS Group survey who are negotiating sourcing agreements with the retailer has declined from 11% in 2018 to 7% in 2019, the July 8 Bloomberg News…

Read More

Editor's Note The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) hospital penalization in the Hospital Acquired Condition Reduction Program (HACRP) was not associated with significant changes in rates of hospital acquired conditions (HACs), 30-day readmissions, or 30-day mortality and does not appear to drive meaningful clinical improvements, this study finds.…

Read More

Editor's Note The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on July 9 that it has formed a summit of key industry stakeholders and government leaders to provide insight as the Trump administration seeks to streamline, improve, and align measures used across federal healthcare quality programs. The Quality Summit,…

Read More

Editor's Note Many patients with low back pain also have sleep disorders, which are linked to more healthcare visits and higher costs for back pain treatment, this study finds. In this analysis of 757 patients with low back pain attending self-management classes at a US military hospital, 195 had a…

Read More

Editor's Note In this study, a predictive model that can help identify patients at higher odds for not requiring a prolonged hospital length of stay (LOS) after total hip arthroplasty was developed and validated and a point-based calculator was designed. The calculator included nine variables: age, opioid use, metabolic equivalents…

Read More