"Like so much in American healthcare, the practice outran the evidence: there have been randomized trials that have shown that vertebroplasty for osteoporosis in the elderly is not an effective therapy," Saini said. "New people who are getting into the field may not do it, but people who always did it, they're always going to say, 'Well, I don't trust that evidence, it works for me.' There's a lot of that in medicine." More
Houston boasts of being home to the Texas Medical Center, the world's biggest medical complex. Yet Houston's medical community also holds a distinction that's hardly boast-worthy: It's the worst major metro area in Texas for unnecessary health care tests and procedures. "Overuse in American hospitals is a pervasive problem that needs to be addressed," Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, says in a news release. "Hospitals want to do better, and these objective measures of performance can help them move forward." More
Every 80 seconds, a hospital in the U.S. delivers a low-value test or procedure to an older adult, putting hundreds of thousands at risk of harm, according to a new analysis from the Lown Institute, a health care think tank. The Institute today released a ranking of over 3,100 U.S. hospitals that examines success at avoiding the use of tests and procedures that offer little to no clinical benefit. More
The increase in ownership of hospices by private equity (PE) firms and publicly traded companies (PTCs) documented by Braun and colleagues follows almost 2 decades of steady growth of for-profit ownership of hospice agencies, from one-third of hospices in 2000 to almost two-thirds by 2017. More
Many people with intellectual and developmental disabilities receive substandard and even harmful healthcare. Tragically, they die preventable, premature deaths, including from extraordinarily high rates of suicide and accidents. More
The accessibility of pharmacies may be an overlooked contributor to persistent racial and ethnic disparities in the use of prescription medications and essential health care services within urban areas in the US. We examined the availability and geographic accessibility of pharmacies across neighborhoods based on their racial/ethnic composition in the thirty most populous US cities. More
Using a 100 percent sample of 2013–16 Medicare fee-for-service claims data, we examined whether hospital and health system ownership of physician practices was associated with changes in site of care and Medicare reimbursement rates for ten common diagnostic imaging and laboratory services. More
Aggressive policing (or aggressive order maintenance policing) is prevalent throughout the US, negatively affecting the health of those exposed to it. More
A new report finds Black women in Illinois are nearly three times as likely as white women to die of a pregnancy-related condition. Meanwhile, several Chicago hospitals have cut maternity services in recent years. More
But there is a lot to apologize for — from Reconstruction to today. More
We asked eight people around the world what they thought. It didn’t go well. More
Disparities in health and access to care in the United States have been thrown into sharp relief by the disproportionate and deadly effect of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic on underserved communities of color and by the grassroots movement toward a racial reckoning that began in earnest in the spring of 2020. More
Covid-19 made virtual medicine a popular investment. But patients should beware. More
A comprehensive 40-year analysis shows the number of Black male and Native American and Alaskan Native medical students has declined. More
Chronic pain from covid can linger for months after patients appear to recover from the disease. More
There is currently no legal right in any U.S. jurisdiction for a person in an encounter with police to request and be provided immediate emergency medical care by an objective clinical entity. A bill in the Massachusetts legislature would provide such a right. More
Overall Medicare spending increases for inpatient care are being driven more by rising volumes of highly reimbursed services than by growth in payments per se. More
Informed consent is fundamental to the ethical and legal doctrines respecting research participants’ voluntary participation in clinical research, enshrined in such documents as the 1947 Nuremberg Code; reaffirmed in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki, revised in 1975, and the 1978 Belmont Report; and codified in the United States in the 1981 Common Rule, revised in 2018 and implemented in 2019. More
“We can no longer tolerate the American people paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. More
In California's San Joaquin Valley, some researchers are turning political to address the social determinants of health. More