Monthly Archive for April 2010
April 21, 2010
links for 2010-04-21
Posted by: Staff on April 21, 2010
Category: Lunch Break Reading
April 20, 2010
The Role of Reputation in U.S. News and World Report's Rankings of the Top 50 American Hospitals
The Director of the Case Center for Reducing Health Disparities has an article that was published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine regarding the procedures used by U.S. News and World Report to rank the 50 best hospitals in the U.S. Dr. Sehgal was curious about how the magazine came up with its list each year and decided to do some analysis of his own.
Dr. Sehgal pointed out that the objective scores showed less variation than reputation did among all hospitals in the survey. That narrower range in objective ratings lends more weight to the reputation points on overall ranking.
"The total index is driven by the one component that has the most variation: reputation score,” Sehgal said. “So the result of that is reputation scores play a predominant role in the ranking of the top 50 hospitals.”
Avery Comarow, the news magazine’s health rankings editor legitimizes this method and said,
"Since we’re looking at hospitals that do really well with the most critical patients, there’s a very good case to be made that the reputational survey is a valid and legitimate form of peer review,” Comarow said."
For more information about this study and reactions to the findings, please see Bloomberg Business Week, Annals of Internal Medicine, or Cleveland WEWS Channel 5 website.
Posted by: Staff on April 20, 2010
Category:
April 06, 2010
links for 2010-04-06
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Will the health care reform only help people of color? On Thursday, The Ohio State University Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity released a fact sheet (PDF) that explains how recently passed reforms won’t improve the low quality treatment received by racial and ethnic minorities. The fact sheet is discussed in this Mother Jones article.
Posted by: Staff on April 06, 2010
Category: Lunch Break Reading
Managing Diseases – Harder Now than Before
We’ve advanced by leaps and bounds when it comes to technology in the field of medicine, but there are still a few things that were better a few decades ago than they are today – like disease management. Yes, we do have better forms of treatment and more medicines than we care to count, but it’s still hard to manage diseases because:
Disease causing germs are now more resistant: There’s no doubt that antibiotics are great when it comes to fighting bacterial infections and preventing diseases when your immune system is down, but when you don’t use it wisely and responsibly, they bring about a mutation of germs that are resistant to any known medicine or antibiotic and which also bring about new forms of diseases. This happens when you don’t use antibiotics as prescribed by your doctor (don’t take them regularly or/and or stop their usage before the prescribed course is completed) and when you pop pills on your own without consulting your medical practitioner.
The world is more connected: It’s a good thing when you want to travel and go from one place to another, but when it comes to containing and preventing the spread of disease, this connectivity becomes a nightmare. Diseases that originate in one corner of the globe can easily spread to all parts of the world because people travel more frequently today and carry disease-causing germs along with them. We only have to consider the SARS epidemic and the swine flu pandemic as examples to see how fast diseases spread across the world and how difficult health departments find it to contain them.
The prevalence of disparities: Although we’ve come a long way in managing to reduce segregation and racial disparities, they still exist. That’s why people who live in poorer parts of cities and towns find it harder to find and access comprehensive medical care and why they are at high risk for various medical complications. Also, they are not too focused on preventive forms of care, like eating the right kind of food and exercising regularly, because they eat what they can afford and tend to fall into bad habits from an early age because of the people they associate with. This makes it harder to contain and prevent the origin of new diseases and the resurgence of old ones.
Older diseases are coming back with a vengeance: And finally, diseases which we thought we had under control, like tuberculosis and malaria, are coming back with a vengeance and becoming harder to cure. Besides this, we’re also faced with new diseases like swine flu which cause widespread panic and mayhem because it is unknown and people don’t know if cures exist.
So as you can see, it’s harder now than before to manage diseases, even though we’re far more technically advanced now and are better prepared to deal with them.
This guest article is written by Teresa Jackson, she writes on the subject of online NP schools. She invites your questions, comments at her email address: teresa.jackson19@gmail.com.
Posted by: Staff on April 06, 2010
Category: