Health affairs
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Use of the World Health Organization's Surgical Safety Checklist has been associated with a significant reduction in major postoperative complications after inpatient surgery. We hypothesized that implementing the checklist in the United States would generate cost savings for hospitals. ⋯ In a hospital with a baseline major complication rate after surgery of at least 3 percent, the checklist generates cost savings once it prevents at least five major complications. Using the checklist would both save money and improve the quality of care in hospitals throughout the United States.
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Historically, general practitioners provided first-contact care in the United States. Today, however, only 42 percent of the 354 million annual visits for acute care--treatment for newly arising health problems--are made to patients' personal physicians. ⋯ Health reform provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that advance patient-centered medical homes and accountable care organizations are intended to improve access to acute care. The challenge for reform will be to succeed in the current, complex acute care landscape.
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The world faces a worsening public health crisis: A growing number of bacteria are resistant to available antibiotics. Yet there are few new antibiotics in the development pipeline to take the place of these increasingly ineffective drugs. ⋯ As an alternative, we recommend a two-prong, "integrated" strategy. This would increase reimbursement for the appropriate, evidence-based use of antibiotics that also met specific public health goals--such as reducing illness levels while limiting antibiotic resistance.
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Physicians contend that the threat of malpractice lawsuits forces them to practice defensive medicine, which in turn raises the cost of health care. This argument underlies efforts to change malpractice laws through legislative tort reform. ⋯ We also found relatively modest differences in physicians' concerns across states with and without common tort reforms. These results suggest that many policies aimed at controlling malpractice costs may have a limited effect on physicians' malpractice concerns.
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Eager to reduce unnecessary use of hospital emergency departments by Medicaid enrollees, states are increasingly implementing cost sharing for nonemergency visits. This paper uses monthly data from the 2001-2006 Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys (MEPS) to examine how changes in nine states' copayment policies influence enrollees' use of emergency departments. The results suggest that requiring copayments for nonemergency visits did not decrease emergency department use by Medicaid enrollees. Future research should examine more closely the effects at the state level and investigate whether these copayments affected the use of other services, such as hospitalizations or visits to physicians by Medicaid enrollees.