BOSTONAdvancements in healthcare have allowed the average lifespan to reach approximately 80 years, but longer lives mean receiving more and spending more forhealthcare. While modern advancements in healthcare, whether in the realm of health IT or pharmaceuticals, may have the ability to reduce these costs, establishing their use in practice can be difficult. A panel of healthcare professionals gathered at the 2012 Harvard Business School Conference on Feb. 4 to discuss this dilemma.

Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of Americas Health Plans, believes that the unprecedented availability of information and opportunity make this an exciting time to be working in the healthcare industry, but said that rising costs make innovation difficult.

HealthGrades has released a list of Americas Top Cities for Hospital Care, with Baltimore, Phoenix/Prescott, Ariz., and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, ranking as the sequential top three. The rankings are based on a study of patient death and complication rates at nearly 5,000 U.S. hospitals.

Often healthcare services in the U.S. are overutilized, which can lead to high healthcare spending. Expanding guidelines and establishing appropriate use criteria for more healthcare services could help eliminate this overuse and in turn reduce high healthcare spending, according to an editorial published in the Jan. 24 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Market competition had only a modest effect on hospital performance for heart failure (HF) care, according to a study in the December issue of the American Journal of Managed Care, prompting the authors to recommend other tools for fostering hospital quality improvement efforts.

Radiology departments must define and monitor their safety metrics to measure departmental performance, identify problem areas and track improvement, while also fostering a supportive department culture, according to an article published in the February issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology.

The Government Accountability Office suggested that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should address the performance of the National Quality Forum, a Washington, D.C-based nonprofit organization contracted by the HHS to retool existing and develop new quality measures for use in the EHR incentive programs.

Thomson Reuters, in its fourth annual study identifying the top U.S. health systems based on balanced system-wide clinical performance, has culled data from more than 300 organizations to single out 15 hospital systems that achieved superior clinical outcomes based on a composite score of eight measures of quality, patient perception of care and efficiency.