In an effort to reduce healthcare costs, the U.S. has succeeded in getting the length of hospital stays for myocardial infarction (MI) down, but the tradeoff may be in higher readmission rates, according to a study that compared 30-day MI readmission rates in the U.S. and 16 other countries. The study in the Jan. 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that patients in the U.S. had the shortest median length of stay but also had a 68 percent increased risk of being readmitted within a month.

Patient-centered medical homes (PCMH), healthcare organizations that employ a coordinated delivery model designed to provide cost-effective care, are emerging as efforts to cure the fragmented nature of the healthcare system. However, there are few standards to guide evaluations of PCMHs' effectiveness, which has prompted the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to make PCMH evaluation recommendations.

The Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality of Johns Hopkins Medicine and Lockheed Martin are working together to build a better intensive care unit (ICU).

In a Dec. 15 letter to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., formally requested that the Institute of Medicine (IOM), to reduce alarm fatigue and create best practice guidelines for vendors developing computerized decision support (CDS) systems.

The widespread belief among healthcare professionals that improved clinical care quality leads to reduced costs could be wrong. The fixed costs associated with operating a healthcare organization largely remain the same regardless of reduced resource utilization, Stephen Rauh, MBA, MS, argued in a Dec. 15 perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Quality measures are expected to play a large part in the fight to lower healthcare costs while increasing quality of care, but building quality measurement sets that are compatible with a wide range of EHRs and other health IT products has proven difficult for both vendors and healthcare provider organizations.

Independence Blue Cross (IBC), an independent, Philadelphia-based licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, announced that it has partnered with the American College of Physicians and will allow up to 100 practices one year of free access to its new online resource, the Medical Home Builder 2.0, which contains analytics tools designed to improve scheduling, patient education and coordination of care.

As hospital staffing units work to provide quality care to patients, their overarching goal must be to tie high quality with a low price tag. Now, a homegrown economic costing tool may help administrators better budget these programs. Researchers at Duke University have developed the TEAM-HF Costing Tool, which generates comprehensive cost estimates to help healthcare managers pinpoint healthcare interventions that are most valuable to patients.