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."
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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.
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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.
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Chronic pain from covid can linger for months after patients appear to recover from the disease.
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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.
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Although cesarean delivery can be lifesaving for both the mother and neonate, the increase in cesarean delivery rates has not been associated with any demonstrable improvements in maternal or neonatal morbidity or mortality.
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While professional guidelines recommend antidepressants for back pain, researchers point out the lack of evidence for their usefulness.
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We're excited to share our new research on hospital overuse just published in JAMA Network Open!
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The adoption of expensive medical technology by individual providers to compete for patients is one of the reasons that U.S. healthcare is the world’s most expensive on a per capita basis. Many experts see proton beam as a classic example of an American-style medical arms race.
“There’s real harm in spending money on something that’s not better and is more expensive. That harm is a hospital not investing in something else that could improve its community or improve the health of more patients,” Shannon Brownlee, special adviser to the president of the Lown Institute, wrote in a recent blog post about proton beam therapy.
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The U.S. government invested $800 million in plasma when the country was desperate for Covid-19 treatments. A year later, the program has fizzled.
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Clinicians should know the rough probability of a patient having a certain disease based on their symptoms and test results. Yet health care practitioners are not as good as you might expect at predicting patients' disease risk, a new study finds.
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Over the past 7 years, many randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have evaluated vitamin D supplementation for improving primary or secondary outcomes of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, bone health, and falls, necessitating a reevaluation of whether screening for vitamin D insufficiency might be worthwhile.
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In this systematic scoping review of 334 published studies in children and adolescents, convincing evidence was found that ADHD is overdiagnosed in children and adolescents. For individuals with milder symptoms in particular, the harms associated with an ADHD diagnosis may often outweigh the benefits.
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A survey of more than 2,200 hospitals finds that despite progress in reducing C-section rates, there's a long way to go.
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The ACP guidelines apply to inpatients and outpatients who have uncomplicated infections.
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In the early 1950s, Dr. Bernard Lown made what he called his greatest contribution to medicine, saving 100,000 lives each year and changing the standard of care for heart attack patients forever--simply by getting people out of bed and into a chair. How did this happen? Watch the video and read the blog below to hear the story in Dr. Lown's own words.
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This survey study examines older adults’ preferences regarding different rationales a clinician may use to explain why a patient should stop an unnecessary or potentially harmful medication.
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Researchers and clinicians focused on long-haul COVID or postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection should remember our oath to first, do no harm.
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Stopping harmful medications sounds simple, but it can be much harder in practice. How can we take what we've learned from deprescribing trials and scale them up? Dr. Justin Turner explains in a webinar hosted by the US Deprescribing Research Network.
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This Viewpoint details the development and regulatory path of aducanumab, a human IgG1 monoclonal antibody to treat Alzheimer disease.
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