Healthy Aging
Care transitions: Best practices and evidence-based programs
Poorly coordinated care transitions from the hospital to other care settings cost an estimated $12 billion to $44 billion per year. Poor transitions also often result in poor health outcomes. The most common adverse effects associated with poor transitions are injuries due to medication errors, complications from procedures, infections, and falls. Providers are focused on improving transitions, due in part …
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Affordable Care Act funding: An analysis of grant programs under health care reform
This brief examines grant programs funded by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), how funds have been distributed to states and local organizations, and the effects of budget sequestration on future ACA funding. The ACA aims to expand health insurance coverage and introduce health care delivery reforms that improve quality and lower costs. The ACA is designed to reduce the number …
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Acute care readmission reduction initiatives: Major program highlights
Beginning October 1, 2012, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began reducing hospitals’ Medicare payments based on 30-day hospital readmission rates. The reductions are based on hospitals’ 30-day risk-adjusted readmission rates relative to national averages. Penalties are imposed for each hospital’s percentage of potentially preventable Medicare readmissions for those conditions. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act …
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Intensity-modulated radiation therapy for breast and lung Cancer: A review of use, cost, clinical evidence, and safety
Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) is a type of radiation therapy that uses inverse-planning tools to derive beamlets with variable intensities within each beam to deliver highly conformal radiation doses to tumors while reducing radiation doses to healthy tissues. Its ability to reduce the radiation dose to surrounding tissue means that higher doses can be given to tumors without increasing the …
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Advance directive registries: A policy opportunity
The most critical health care decisions facing patients and families are often made under the most difficult of circumstances—in emergencies, or when patients are not able to speak for themselves. When patients are unable to communicate their own wishes for treatment, and have not made them known to family or physicians in advance with an advance directive, it is up …
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Health care use variation in Michigan
For more than 20 years, researchers at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice have been sharing data on regional variation in the use of health care services: Variation that does not seem to be explained by health status or other relevant differences among the populations studied. Most of work done on geographic variation has been done on …
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Health care cost drivers: Chronic disease, comorbidity, and health risk factors in the U.S. and Michigan
In the wake of national health reform, health systems, health plans, providers, and policy makers will be discussing what can be done to contain health care costs — within the provisions of reform or beyond them. For that discussion, it will be important to understand that health care spending is not distributed evenly across the population—or by condition. In fact, …
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Health care spending by country, state, and payer
Experts on all sides of the health reform debate agree that the current rate of growth in health care spending is unsustainable and ultimately damaging to the country’s economy and health system alike. Patients experience this stress in a more personal way, through rising out-of-pocket costs or by struggling to get the care they need. Most agree that measures to …
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