In 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) adopted SEP-1, a controversial sepsis quality metric drawn from the Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC) guidelines. Extensive focus on guideline evidence, covered well elsewhere, leaves out the details surrounding the process of its implementation.1,2 This post will describe the process and Read more…
How much do hospitals spend just to get paid? A new study1 in JAMA estimates that the cost of billing and insurance activities at a large academic health system in Durham, North Carolina ranged from $20 for a primary care visit to $62 for an emergency visit to $215 for Read more…
US health care spending has had a notorious reputation for high spending and low outcomes.1 A new study in November’s JAMA tackles from a high level perspective the question of why the US is such an outlier with its high health care spending. Dieleman et al (2017)2 identified the most Read more…
Avoidable Emergency Department (ED) visits are difficult to define but of vital interest to ED reimbursement and profit. A newly released study1 from UCSF Department of Emergency Medicine estimated “avoidable” visits comprise 3.3% of ED visits. Some have hailed the study as evidence that avoidable ED visits are a “myth,” Read more…