Weekly Roundup: Health care news and notes
December 19, 2014 · NCQA
Every Friday NCQA gives a rundown of some of the health care news stories from the past week. Here are some of our picks for this week:
- Health IT enabled quality improvement: A vision for better health and health care. [Healthcare IT News]
- Rhode Island Primary Care Physicians Corp. on improving care across all platforms. [Providence Business News]
- Top-performing hospitals know how to use teamwork. [Modern Healthcare]
- Federal goal: Vaccinate 80 percent of boys and girls against HPV. [Wall Street Journal]
- Nearly 3 in 10 Americans with diabetes don’t know. [U.S. News]
- Affordable Care Act newly insured are more satisfied with costs (75 percent) compared to all with health insurance (61 percent), only 5 percent rate their coverage as poor. [Gallup]
- How the health law is using Medicare to improve hospital quality. [Kaiser Health News]
- Follow-up care important for people who have suffered strokes and heart attacks. [UM Health System]
- High-quality, affordable care: Making the case for smarter networks. [Health Affairs]
- Assessing Americans’ familiarity with health insurance terms and concepts. [Kaiser Family Foundation]
- When health insurance deductibles are high relative to income, many people skip needed care. [Commonwealth Fund]
- The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s vision for ensuring health information technology is deployed to enable robust and continuous quality improvement. [Healthcare IT News]
- New study bolsters case for coordinating mental health treatment with health care. [NJ Spotlight]
- Fat to blame for half a million cancers a year, WHO agency says. [Reuters]
- New ACO rules would delay penalties an extra three years. [Kaiser Health News]
- Up to 1/3 adults with high blood pressure not screened for diabetes despite guidelines. [New York Times]
- Humana and MultiCare Health System partner to launch Accountable Care in Washington. [Market Watch]
- Why Medicare won’t force penalties on ACOs that don’t save money. [Modern Healthcare]
- Connecticut insurers offering new benefit plans that rank hospitals and doctors by cost and quality metrics. [Hartford Business]
- CMS’s first chief data officer, Niall Brennan, will work to improve data collection and transparency. [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services]
- Parents who won’t vaccinate are reviving once-dead diseases. [Wall Street Journal]
- Few states move to establish exchanges despite subsidies’ legal peril. [Modern Healthcare]
- Urban Institute report: The number of uninsured nonelderly adults fell by an estimated 10.6 million between September 2013 and September 2014. [Health Policy Center]
- More cost of health care shifts to consumers. [Wall Street Journal]
- One third of small business employees and two thirds of large company employees can choose from multiple insurance plans. [Fox Business]
- Health spending rose 3.6 percent in 2013, the least since in 1960, and remained at 17.4 percent of GDP. [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services]
- The health-cost slowdown isn’t just about the economy. [New York Times]
- Affordable Care Act patient safety steps saved $12 billion via 1.3 million fewer hospital-acquired conditions & 50 thousand fewer deaths. [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services]
- Health care law is not one-size-fits-all, and here’s why. [New York Times]
- Old and overmedicated: the real drug problem in nursing homes. [NPR]
- Global budgets pushing Maryland hospitals to target population health. [Modern Healthcare]
- Transforming rural health care: high-quality, sustainable access to specialty care. [Health Affairs]
- Employers unfamiliar with information on the quality of health plans. [Insurance News Net]
- Certifying the good physician: a work in progress. [JAMMA]
- Health care leaders have differing views on how safe U.S. hospitals are compared to 15 years ago. [Modern Healthcare]
- Study shows patients don’t understand risks of unnecessary antibiotics. [Science Daily]
- Forbidden topic in health policy debate: cost effectiveness. [New York Times]
- Low vaccine rates lead to disease outbreaks in Michigan. [Slate]
