SILVERTHORNE, Colo. — When Adolfo Román García-Ramírez walks home in the evening from his shift at a grocery store in this central Colorado mountain town, sometimes he thinks back on his childhood in Nicaragua. Adults, he recollects, would scare the kids with tales of the “Mona Bruja,” or “Monkey Witch.” Step too far into the…
This data note analyzes the extent to which hospital spending has contributed to the growth in national health expenditures in recent years and over the long term using data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) National Health Expenditures Accounts (NHEA).
This issue brief gives an overview of the main systems used by the federal government to track vaccine safety and adverse events following vaccinations. The brief reviews the history of federal vaccine safety systems, describes the key systems and their strengths and limitations, and also discusses how vaccine safety issues have become the subject of…
Complaints about enrollment fraud in Affordable Care Act health insurance coverage have bedeviled the federal marketplace for years. Now, the Trump administration is claiming wins in reducing the problem while simultaneously saying more controls are needed. It has proposed a sweeping set of ACA regulations for next year, including stepped-up requirements for some applicants to…
Healthcare inefficiency is rarely about a single task. It is typically about disjointed systems, misaligned incentives, and fragmented accountability. When we automate broken processes like these, we simply fail faster and at scale. The post Digitized Dysfunction: Why Healthcare Must Eliminate Work — Not Just Automate It appeared first on MedCity News.
Federal health officials do not inform consumers about severe safety violations in hospitals that specialize in physical rehabilitation. Nor does Medicare impose fines as it does for nursing homes, or provide easy-to-understand five-star ratings as it does for general hospitals, according to an investigation by KFF Health News and The New York Times. Medical rehab…
Fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid driving the nation’s high drug overdose rates, is also caught up in another increasingly serious problem: misinformation. False and misleading narratives on social media, in news reports, and even in popular television dramas suggesting people can overdose from touching fentanyl — rather than ingesting it — are now informing policy…
Successful healthcare innovators harness behavioral science to achieve adoption and behavior change. The post Nudges, Not Information, For Engagement And Adoption appeared first on MedCity News.
According to the Washington Post, at least 390,000 students were exposed to a school shooting (exposure is defined as students attending a school at which a shooting occurred during the current school year) since the 1999 Columbine shooting. This brief analyzes the rate of student exposure to school shootings over time at the national and…
The federal government has drastically scaled back the number of recommended childhood immunizations, sidelining six routine vaccines that have safeguarded millions from serious diseases, long-term disability, and death. Just three of the six immunizations the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it will no longer routinely recommend — against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and…