06.05.2015
Clinical Alerts
06.05.2015
Changes in Medicare Costs with the Growth of Hospice Care
Use of hospice services amongst nursing home residents significantly increased between 2004 and 2009 providing an opportunity to examine changes in Medicare expenditures in the...
05.04.2015
Choosing Wisely: Ten Things Physicians and Patients Should Question
Weighing risks vs. benefits when caring for the aging population is of utmost concern in hospice care. The “Choosing Wisely” guidelines developed in 2012 by...
05.04.2015
Medicare Focused on “Getting the Payment Right” for Medications in Hospice
Medicare continues to focus on payment for medications in hospice and for “getting the payment right”. In this recently published USA TODAY article, Medicare officials discuss...
04.15.2015
Evidence-based deprescribing of statins in patients with advance illness
An accompanying article to the Kutner study highlighted the increasing focus placed on diminishing benefits and, in some cases, harms when used in patients with...
04.15.2015
Safety and benefit of discontinuing statin therapy
Statins are examples of medications in which risks outweigh benefits for patients with limited prognosis. Jean Kutner and colleagues recently published in JAMA the results...
03.30.2015
Top-ranked quality indicators for hospice and palliative care
Measuring the quality of care delivery is essential to assessment and improvement of hospice and palliative care programs, however no standard quality indicator set exists...
03.20.2015
IOM National Action Conference on Policies and Payment to Improve End-of-Life Care
ON March 20th, the Institute of Medicine hosted a national meeting of policy and health care leaders and other stakeholders to discuss ways to implement...
02.10.2015
CMS now includes measures of antipsychotic use in the Nursing Home Compare Five Star Quality Rating System
As part of its commitment to reducing the inappropriate use of antipsychotics, in February, CMS strengthened the Five Star Rating System to include the use...