Chest
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The passage of health-care reform and current efforts in payment reform signal the beginning of a significant transformation of the US health-care system. An entire new set of structures is being developed to facilitate increased access to care that is cost-effective and of high quality. As described in The Institute of Medicine report "Crossing the Quality Chasm," our nation is charting a path toward quality health care that aims to be safe, efficient, effective, timely, patient-centered, and equitable. ⋯ Third, as part of our care redesign, we must assure that we are prepared to meet the ethical challenges ahead and reassert the importance of equity, fairness, and caring as key building blocks of a new care delivery system. As we move ahead, it is critical to assure that our health-care system is culturally competent and has the capacity to deliver high-quality care for all, while eliminating disparities and assuring equity. Disparities are unjust, unethical, costly, and unacceptable-and integrating strategies to achieve equity as part of our health-care system's transformation will give us an incredible opportunity to comprehensively address them.
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Reducing preventable readmissions for COPD is an important national health policy goal. Thus far, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) policies focused on incentivizing improvements in inpatient quality have had variable success. ⋯ CMS hopes that posthospital transitional care and services will substitute for readmission, but the evidence supporting this hypothesis is mixed. In this article, we discuss ways for ambulatory pulmonologists to leverage transitional care management payments to enhance access for their patients with COPD while minimizing the risk of a paradoxic increase in readmission rates.