heart failure
Avandia, Actos get'black box' warning
As of this week, it's become clear critics and activists have won their point. The FDA has announced Avandia and Actos will soon bear a "black-box" warning detailing possible cardiac failure risks... Read more...
SPOTLIGHT: Sutter responds to dicey federal heart stats
So if your facility came out badly in CMS's new batch of stats on heart failure, what do you do? That's the problem facing Sacramento, CA-based Sutter Medical Center. Article
AMA group endorses quality measures
A group of medical societies brought together by the American Medical Association continued last week to define its approach on quality measurement. The consortium, which includes more than 100 specialty and state medical societies, has developed 184 physician quality measures to date. The 184 measures address conditions that represent 80 percent of Medicare reimbursement, including asthma, hypertension and heart failure. Now the group, the Physician Consortium for Performance …
... Read more...Avandia controversy sparks FDA criticism
As anyone reading FierceHealthcare knows, diabetes drug Avandia came under heavy fire this week when a New England Journal of Medicine study suggested that it significantly raised the risk of heart failure. Now the expanding controversy has reached the FDA's doorstep. Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen has released an internal FDA memo from 2002 citing 25 Avandia-related heart failure cases, contending that the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research should …
... Read more...Hospital heart attack deaths plummet
Thanks to improved treatments, including more-frequent angioplasties and effective drug use, the number of hospitalized heart attack victims who die or experience severe heart failure has dropped almost in half over the last six years. This is the conclusion drawn by an international group of researchers, who looked at heart attack care in 14 countries. The study, which is being published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that compared with six years ago, …
... Read more...ALSO NOTED: New Orleans officials wrangle over vouchers; FL hospitals defend quality; and much more...
> New Orleans health system leaders continue to wrangle over whether the poor should be cared for by charity hospitals or receive insurance vouchers. Article
> Two Florida hospitals which came out badly in JCAHO measures of heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia treatment are defending their performance, suggesting that the scores can be deceptive. …
... Read more...CMS extends pay-for-performance program
CMS has extended its pay-for-performance program for three more years, pleased with the results of the program's first two years of results. By CMS's measures, participating hospitals improved overall quality by 11.8 percent during the second year. In response, CMS paid out $8.7 million to the 115 hospitals that performed the best. The next three years of the program, the Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration, will test two new P4P models, one for hospitals that meet a given …
... Read more...CMS to post hospital heart attack care data
In 2006, employers, managed care plans, trade groups, state governments and federal agencies took an aggressive role in bringing pricing and outcomes data to the public. It looks like the transparency trend that took center stage last year will continue to expand, as CMS announced yesterday that it would post hospitals' heart attack and heart failure death rates on the web. But rather than posting actual death rates, the government will compare hospitals and let patients know if a …
... Read more...Better Medicare ratings don't mean fewer deaths
In using quality ratings, patients and health purchasers may feel they're getting some assurance that they can predict the outcome of their care. Well, in this case, apparently they can't--at least not yet. According to new research, there seems to be little difference in hospital death rates for three common conditions (heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia) regardless of how the hospitals rank on Medicare hospital performance measures. The study, by the University of Pennsylvania's …
... Read more...Nurse-trained patients less likely to be readmitted
An ongoing University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study suggests that patients are less likely to be readmitted to the hospital if nurses train them on self-care. The 100 nurses involved in the study, who work at an Aurora Health Care hospital in Kenosha, WI, work with surgical and medical patients, the elderly and those with heart failure and total hip or knee replacements. Using an electronic medical record, the nurses pinpoint a patient's overall needs, then make use of one of 50 standard …
... Read more...