Placing formulary restrictions on brand name drugs shifts use toward generics, lowers the cost per prescription fill, and has minimal impact on overall adherence for antidiabetes, antihyperlipidemia, and antihypertension medications among low-income subsidy recipients in Medicare Part D plans.
One-year persistence among new users of statins in Finland improved from 1995 to 1998, after which no substantial changes were observed up to 2004.
Rapidly advancing health information technologies are changing the nature of team-based care; there is a critical need to examine how trust functions in contemporary team-based care.
We assessed the frequency of and reasons for medically unnecessary hospital days, which affect patients, payers, hospitals, and healthcare providers.
A lag in policy changes has resulted in significant variation across palliative care programs for treating advanced illnesses. A recent shift in policy has, however, allowed small-scale testing of community-based palliative care delivery and some innovations in other delivery systems.
Essential health benefits form a cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act. Our study shows that health plans in California and Massachusetts are not fully compliant with state and federal regulations on essential drug benefits.
Palliative and hospice care services produce well-known benefits for patients living with serious illness and for their families. Benefits include improved quality of life and reduced symptom burden, spiritual and emotional distress, and caregiver distress.
This analysis of antiosteoporosis therapy shows that 75% of patients have inadequate drug coverage and that adherence is strongly associated with age and administration regimen.
Factors most important for successful implementation of collaborative care for depression differ for patient activation versus achieving remission; both are critical to program success.
Hospitals participating in accountable care organizations (ACOs) have greater adoption of health information technology, particularly patient-facing technology and health information exchange, than non-ACO hospitals.
This article analyzes the use of MRI in a national sample of patients with wrist pain before and after consensus guideline publication.
Acute sinusitis is a common acute illness and offers an opportunity to eliminate low-value care. The authors describe current practices, comparing primary care, urgent care, and the emergency department.
This study tests the feasibility of projecting commercial insurance demographic information to the US Census population, and creating the framework for a simple weighting scheme.
This study highlights disparities in care for diabetes and hypertension for individuals with serious mental illness compared with the general Medicaid and Medicare populations.
This paper illustrates how Medicare Advantage plans and accountable care organizations could benefit from adopting innovative care delivery models, and suggests policy changes to accelerate spread.
Despite previous research evidence, this study did not reveal an overall association of health literacy, numeracy, and graph literacy with all-cause hospitalizations or mortality.
Rapid progression of diabetes complications was associated with higher risk of severe hypoglycemia.
Authors from The Brookings Institution update their recommendations by focusing on 3 concrete objectives to slow spending and improve quality of care within the next 5 years.
The policy community should consider these concrete suggestions to address the challenges presented by social determinants of health.
The 6 finalists will pitch their innovations at Google’s campus February 27 for a chance to win up to $50,000 in in-kind services from Boston Scientific and Google.
Higher continuity of care was statistically significant and was associated with fewer ambulatory care–sensitive condition hospitalizations.