Guides/Reports
American Hospital Association guides and reports for members and the health care field.
Treating U.S. veterans with mental illness and substance use disorders is more expensive than caring for veterans with other medical conditions, costing more than $12 billion in 2007, according to a new RAND Corporation study. The study found that while the proportion of veterans who received the…
The Affordable Care Act includes several provisions designed to encourage greater coordination and integration among health care providers, including the promotion of accountable care organizations and health homes. While much discussion has focused on how these strategies might be adopted by…
A controversial safety intervention, rapid response systems (RRS) do not appear to improve clinical outcomes despite being extremely popular among hospital staff, who point to many individual cases where RRS have been beneficial. This ethnographic analysis of RRS at two British hospitals…
According to the survey, few nurses and physicians reported routinely submitting online reports, in contrast to physicists, dosimetrists and radiation therapists who reported the most use of error and near-miss reporting systems. Nearly all respondents agreed that error reporting is their…
This report outlines promising provisions in the Affordable Care Act to achieve improved health and cost containment. It goes on to project the financial impact of those provisions.
n response to growing interest from the hospital community in better understanding and improving the experience of patients and their families during hospitalization, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement conducted an in-depth review of the research, studied exemplar organizations, and…
The focus of this edition of the Economic Outlook is the physician preference market. The content provides trends in purchasing behavior regarding physician preference items; strategies for managing the cost of physician preference items; and how shifts in the health care landscape, such as…
The business adage 'what gets measured gets managed' applies in health care. Two projects focus on measuring and improving the patient experience in community clinics.
The National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2011, updates a series of comprehensive assessments of U.S. population health and health care quality, access, efficiency, and equity. It finds substantial improvement on quality-of-care indicators that have been the focus of public…
In a recent study, the non-profit Commonwealth Fund found that the U.S. ranks 16th out of 16 nations when it comes to preventable deaths. If we did as well as the top-performing countries, France and Australia, close to 90,000 deaths could be prevented each year. As costs continue to climb, adding…