National Health Service (NHS) Blogs This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

When Health Care Transformation Fails
Last year was tough for the transformation of health care from volume to value. Two major medical home studies (Friedberg and Rosenthal) and two major readmission prevention studies (Goldman and Dhalla) had negative to underwhelming results. Thirteen of the original 32 Pioneer Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have dropped out of the program. Of the original 220 Medicare Shared Savings Program ACOs, only 53 held spending enough below their targets to receive performance payments. Given the significant investments these ACOs made in the infrastructure needed to manage risk, and that the top 12 ACOs were responsible for...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 27, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Stuart Pollack Tags: Featured Health Professionals Hospitals Organization and Delivery Quality ACOs adaptive reserve Health Reform National Demonstration Project PCMH triple aim Source Type: blogs

Integrating Behavioral Medicine Into Primary Care GME: A Necessary Paradigm For 21st Century Ambulatory Practice
Limited access to child and adolescent, adult, and geriatric psychiatry, as well as other mental health providers, has a large impact on the capacity of our health care system to address mental health needs, particularly in underserved urban and rural areas. A major determinant of this limited access is an under-supply of mental health providers. The recently developed Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education (THCGME) program provides a promising resource to address this problem because of its unique educational setting, which could facilitate integration of behavioral medicine into primary care graduate medical e...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 24, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Alan Axelson Tags: Health Policy Lab Health Professionals Organization and Delivery Population Health Behavioral Health GME Primary Care Source Type: blogs

Teaching Health Centers: Targeted Expansion For Immediate GME Reform
We describe examples of current or proposed programs which illustrate the potential of these modifications. Need for Immediate Targeted GME Expansion in Primary Care There is broad agreement on the need for adequate numbers of physicians prepared to work in primary care, geriatrics and psychiatry in urban and rural underserved areas. A 12,000-31,000 shortage over current primary care physician supply in the next ten years is anticipated, depending on modeling considerations such as physician retirement rates and entrance of advanced practice nurses to take up some of the duties physicians currently perform. Regional and st...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 24, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Richard Rieselbach Tags: Costs and Spending Health Policy Lab Health Professionals Organization and Delivery Graduate medical education teaching health centers THCGME Source Type: blogs

Health Care Reform And The Trap Of The “Iron Law”
With alarming regularity, many promising pilots in the health care improvement and implementation field have little overall impact when applied more broadly. For example, following early reports that care coordination programs benefit patients and reduce costs, a 2012 Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report found no net benefit, on average, across 34 care coordination and disease management programs on hospital admissions or regular Medicare spending. In 2014, Friedberg and colleagues found patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) in Pennsylvania had no impact on utilization or costs of care, and negligible improvement i...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 22, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Rocco Perla Tags: Featured Organization and Delivery Quality care delivery CMMI evaluation health care Policy quality improvement Research Rossi's Iron Law Source Type: blogs

5 years ago…”Health Reform: The Ayes Have It”
With all the calls for repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act it is hard to remember some of the important firsts that happened five years ago today. Reading the post Disruptive Woman Founder Robin Strongin wrote that day is a quick reminder of them. We most assuredly have a long way to go in improving our health care system, but we should take the time to reflect on and appreciate how far we’ve come. What a night…several decades in the making as many Representatives kept reminding us. Why was last night different than all other nights? Perhaps because for the first time there was a WOMAN Speaker o...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - March 23, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Health Reform Source Type: blogs

Health Affairs’ March Issue: The Benefits And Limitations Of Information
This study is part of Health Affairs’ DataWatch series. Another study examining different kinds of health plan benefits: Comparing Employer-Sponsored And Federal Exchange Plans: Wide Variations In Cost Sharing For Prescription Drugs; Christine Buttorff of the RAND Corporation and coauthors. From England, lessons learned by the National Health Service in paying for value. In England, as is the case in the United States, containing health spending is a major focus of current health policy. A flattening budget coupled with growing service demand drove the country’s National Health Service (NHS) to seek cumulative effici...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - March 2, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Chris Fleming Tags: All Categories Consumers Coverage Employer-Sponsored Insurance Europe Health Law Health Reform Hospitals Pharma Policy Quality Spending Workforce Source Type: blogs

Equality analysis: The National Health Service (charges to overseas visitors) regulations 2015
Department of Health (DH) - Overseas visitors who need healthcare while in England will soon be charged differently for using the NHS as part of efforts to recoup £500 million a year by 2017 to 2018. This equality analysis assesses the effect of the changes introduced by the regulations on overseas visitors with ‘protected characteristics’ compared to the rest of the overseas visitor and ordinarily resident population. Guidance Press release (Source: Health Management Specialist Library)
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - February 17, 2015 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: NHS finances and productivity Source Type: blogs

What Should You be Worried About? It’s Not What You Think
Worriers out there – take note. You’re probably spending your precious brain energy worrying about the wrong things. If you want to know what’s most likely to kill you, the British National Health Service’s Atlas of Risk can tell you. The tool does a great job putting health risks into perspective, and can be customized for your sex and age group. It’s interesting to see how the causes of death change with age. One thing that becomes clear as you play with the risk tool. Most of the things that could kill you throughout your adult life can be prevented by three things which are in your contr...
Source: The Blog That Ate Manhattan - February 13, 2015 Category: Primary Care Authors: Margaret Polaneczky, MD Tags: Women's Health Source Type: blogs

The short run elasticity of National Health Service nurses’ labour supply in Great Britain
Institute for Financial Studies (IFS) - The paper investigates the short run responsiveness of NHS nurses’ labour supply to changes in wages of NHS nurses relative to wages in outside options available to nurses, utilising the panel data aspect of the annual survey of hours and earnings. We find the short run responsiveness of NHS nurses’ labour supply to the relative wage of NHS nurses is positive and statistically significant, albeit economically small, in regions outside the London area. In contrast, in the London region, the short run elasticity is much higher. We discuss the policy implications of these find...
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - February 6, 2015 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: Workforce and employment Source Type: blogs

It can't happen here . . .
. . . but it should. I'm talking about evaluating medical interventions in terms of their costs as well as their benefits. And I do mean monetary costs.In the UK, the Death Panel is called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE -- in the acronym they omit the H). This blog post by Austin Frakt explains how they do it. He doesn't really explain the Incremental Cost Effectiveness Ratio, so I will tell you that in simple terms it's the cost per Quality Adjusted Life Year of a treatment. Here's the definition of a QALY:A quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) takes into account both the quantity and quality of ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 21, 2015 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs

Reflections on inclusiveness for those who would be leaders
I was interested to read Dr. Braveman's blog post yesterday on Triple Aim. In that post he stated "What did surprise me was the call for volunteer leaders to stop sharing their opinions and perspectives on such issues with the rationale that the issues can be interpreted by some as political and partisan." You can read the whole post at http://otconnections.aota.org/community_blogs/b/brentbraveman/archive/2015/01/08/why-we-should-hear-more-about-health-policy-issues-such-as-the-triple-aim-of-healthcare.aspxHe doesn't reference what 'call' he was referring to, but I would like respond to that statement because o...
Source: ABC Therapeutics Occupational Therapy Weblog - January 9, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: health insurance OT practice policy Source Type: blogs

TTIP Opponents Fret Over Phantom Liberalization of GIs
K. William Watson Some of the most vocal criticism of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a proposed trade agreement between the European Union and the United States, is coming from Europeans worried that the agreement will liberalize parts of their economy that it actually won’t. This is a very frustrating situation, because supporters of the agreement are then forced to assure critics that the TTIP will not, in fact, do this particular good thing they don’t want it to do. For example, people have claimed angrily that the TTIP will require the UK to privatize its National Health Service and then...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - January 8, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: K. William Watson Source Type: blogs

A Picture Putting Risks into Perspective
The National Health Service in the United Kingdom has recently disseminated a wonderful graphic, helping people understand how likely they are to die from scary things, like war and airplane accidents, versus less terrifying but deadlier hazards, such as high … Continue reading → (Source: blog.bioethics.net)
Source: blog.bioethics.net - January 6, 2015 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Peter Ubel Tags: Health Care behavioral economics Behavioral Economics and Public Policy heart disease obesity Peter Ubel syndicated tobacco Source Type: blogs

A (Global) Cornucopia Of Clues To Optimize Medication Use
The most common patient care intervention, issuing a prescription, is fraught with continuing challenges for patients, their caregivers, and practitioners. Patients rely on medications across a continuum of care, with expectations for self-management; some experience unintended problems along the way. For older patients, such problems often result in emergency hospitalizations, many of which could be prevented. Historically, integration to support safe and appropriate medicine use across the U.S. health care ecosystem has been sporadic, including within our siloed Medicare Part D benefit. Other countries, however, are well...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - January 6, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: N. Lee Rucker, Michael Holden, Parisa Aslani, and Rana Ahmed Tags: All Categories Global Health Health Care Costs Health Care Delivery Pharma Policy Public Health Source Type: blogs

12 STI’s of Christmas, 2014
I missed posting this last year! My yearly Christmas favorite, reposted: Courtesy of the British National Health Service (click the banner): NSFW. Funny, but Unsafe for work,unless your work involves STD’s in which case it’s required. It’s my seasonal favorite post, and I hope it’s one of yours. Not the STD’s, the funny song with equally amusing illustrations. The backstory, from a previous blog post: I have seen several searches of this blog for the British National Health Services’ “12 STI’s of Christmas“, and wondered why. The answer: the NHS site no longer carries the wonderful s...
Source: GruntDoc - December 22, 2014 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: GruntDoc Tags: Amusements Source Type: blogs