gap

Public health officials aren't quite sure why, but in California, African-Americans are dying earlier than whites, according to a new study. White Californian men are living an average of seven more... Read more...

Bigger deductibles. Larger co-pays. More policy exclusions. It's hardly surprising patients are beginning to look for new ways to pay for their care. And the always-helpful consumer credit industry... Read more...

Out in the hinterlands of rural Missouri, doctors are scarce. Increasingly, the state's advanced practice nurses are jumping into the gap, creating rural clinics of the sort typically run by country... Read more...

While patients well understand high blood glucose can lead to ugly complications like blindness and kidney failure, few recognize that keeping cholesterol and blood pressure low are equally critical... Read more...

Like states across the U.S., Maryland is seeing a growing shortage of healthcare professionals, a Maryland Hospital Association study says. As elsewhere, with nurses retiring and baby boomers aging,... Read more...

While nurse turnover can cost hospitals as much as $5.4 million per year, hospital executives typically are working harder on other issues, including quality improvement, reimbursement problems and uncompensated care, a new study shows. The Pricewaterhouse Cooper study, which included data from 237 hospital respondents, found nurse and physician staffing were sixth and seventh, respectively, on a list of key issues cited. On average, executives reported temporary nurses were staffing an …

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The growing healthcare staffing shortage is nasty news for providers--but it should be great for the healthcare staffing industry. With the number of Americans aged 55 to 64 set to expand 40 percent by 2014, few observers expect provider recruitment to be able to keep pace. This is good news for healthcare recruiters, including giants like AMN Healthcare Services and Cross Country Healthcare. Of late, companies like these have gone through hard times, as hospitals cut staffing levels to a …

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While the federal government has greatly expanded funding for community health centers, it seems that its medical staff hasn't kept pace. Like their private sector counterparts, many of the country's clinics are now struggling to find the primary care physicians they need to function, despite paying reasonable salaries. Meanwhile, doctors who are on board are facing swelling caseloads, which could lead to turnover and make things worse. Health centers are coping, in part, by taking …

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Care quality, access, costs and rates of avoidable hospitalizations vary widely from state to state, with a huge gap between the best and worst performers, according to new research from a health advocacy group. The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System, which released its "State Scorecard on Health System Performance" yesterday, found that states which provide good access to care (especially access to health insurance) tend to offer a better quality of care as …

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To date, virtually all of the major studies of healthcare quality have focused on care for adults, partly because children aren't prone to chronic diseases like diabetes whose outcomes can be measured easily. The gap in quality measures is particularly large when it comes to inpatient care, according to a study by the National Association of Children's Hospitals. However, a new bill being considered in the Senate would change the equation, budgeting $100 million over the next five years …

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