Utilizing Respiratory Therapists to Reduce Costs of Care

Strategies to reduce cancer-care costs.

P ayment for cancer care will change radically over the next decade as the nation struggles to hold down health care costs, experts told an early October Institute of Medicine forum, Delivering Affordable Cancer Care in the 21st Century. Traditional fee-for-service medicine, in which oncology reimbursement relies disproportionately on profits from expensive chemotherapy drugs, will give way to ...

Can Respiratory Therapists Impact COPD Readmissions and Costs?

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act1 has had the most significant impact on the financial operations and viability of hospitals and health systems since the introduction of the Medicare and Medicaid Entitlement Program in the 1960s. For hospitals and health systems, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act addresses a fundamental shift from payment for services provided within ...

Utilizing therapists to obtain death penalty verdicts.

As a result of recent decisions by the United States and California Supreme Courts, therapists now have been placed in a position in which they can be forced to testify in death penalty cases for the only purposes of achieving a conviction and a death penalty verdict. Zeal for the death penalty seems to have overcome any concern for the ethics of psychiatrists or even for the welfare of society...

Medicaid managed care: how to target efforts to reduce costs

BACKGROUND To be successful, cost control efforts must target Medicaid Managed Care (MMC) beneficiaries likely to incur high costs. The critical question is how to identify potential high cost beneficiaries with simple, reproducible, transparent, auditable criteria. Our objective in this analysis was to evaluate whether the total burden of comorbidity, assessed by the Charlson comorbidity index...

Utilizing a transfer of care bundle to reduce unplanned readmissions to the cardiac intensive care unit