Clinical

Once limited to filling and dispensing drugs, pharmacists are increasingly providing direct care to patients. Across the country, they are working with doctors to give immunizations and help patients safely manage medications.

Providing a solid base of primary-care service and coordinating specialty care for high-risk patients has been advocated as a method of lowering overall healthcare costs. Doing so would presumably reduce repeat hospitalization and emergency department visits.

Not every new drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has undergone the rigorous clinical testing that physicians and their patients might expect, according to new research.

Dennis Scanlon, PhD, professor of health policy and administration at Penn State University, says there are a number of ways professionals continue to use data to improve delivery outcomes.

Hospitals in the U.S. have rebounded from the Great Recession and are showing stronger operating margins than in years past, even as more care shifts from inpatient to outpatient.

A look back at some of the InFocus blog highlights of 2013.

The Health IT Policy Committee (HITPC) adopted recommendations from its Consumer Empowerment Workgroup on patient-generated health data (PGHD) at its December meeting and is expected to finalize its complete Stage 3 recommendations in February.

Cancer drug prices have doubled in the past decade, from an average of $5,000 per month to more than $10,000.

As accountable care organizations proliferate across the nation, delivery systems still struggle to balance quality improvement, cost containment, and migration toward accountable care. This paper describes the phased approach where the University of Florida Health Science Center and Shands Teaching Hospital and Clinics, Inc, and Orlando Health have jointly developed a series of clinical and health services that are of the highest quality and are offered at the lowest cost. The result is a regional collaborative that will be the foundation for a regional accountable care organization, first leveraging clinical core competencies, then moving to a more integrated model.

Thousands of hospitals, large and small, are girding for cuts to their Medicare payments in 2014, as federal pay-for-performance programs aimed at boosting clinical quality, improving patient experience and preventing unnecessary hospital readmissions roll into their second year.

Matching labor supply with service demand is a challenge for many US industries, but perhaps no industry faces greater workforce pressures than healthcare.

Patricia Coyle, MD, director, MS Comprehensive Care Center, Stony Brook Neurosciences Institute, professor and vice chair of clinical affairs, Department of Neurology, SUNY at Stony Brook, says that prognostically, the earlier you treat multiple sclerosis the better.

There has been a lot of press lately about care coordination, and how it will play a significant role in improving patient outcomes. But despite all of this positive coverage, inter-organizational care coordination is far from becoming a reality.

The disparities in survival among node-positive breast cancer patients of African American and Hispanic heritage are not explained by nodal surgery utilization.

Primary care providers utilize many strategies for prioritizing preventive care during time-constrained clinical encounters, in addition to being prompted by clinical reminders.

Identifying which patients are likely to benefit from care coordination is important. We evaluated the performance of 6 risk-screening instruments in predicting healthcare utilization.

Home blood pressure (BP) monitoring and use of secure webbased tools to manage care collaboratively with pharmacists is a cost-effective way to improve BP control.

States offering pharmacists full immunization privileges have significantly higher vaccination uptake rates for pneumococcal disease and herpes zoster than states with restricted or no authorization.

Coupons and vouchers for name-brand prescription drugs claim to cut costly out-of-pocket expenses, but they actually may be doing very little to control prices.

Between 2005 and 2011, rates of cardiac catheterization laboratory false activation doubled while mean door-to-balloon times for primary PCI declined.

According to several healthcare CIOs giving testimony yesterday in the District of Columbia, hospitals are pressed for both time and money when it comes to implementing the necessary changes to their EHR systems and clinical workflows.