HHS announces $685 million to support clinicians delivering high quality, patient-centered care
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell today announced $685 million in awards to 39 national and regional health care networks and supporting organizations to help equip more than 140,000 clinicians with the tools and support needed to improve quality of care, increase patients’ access to information, and reduce costs. The Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative is one of the largest federal investments designed to support doctors and other clinicians in all 50 states through collaborative and peer-based learning networks.
Let’s Refuse to Accept Medical Errors as the Standard of Care for Frail Elders
By Joanne Lynn
Marcy Houle’s father was once abruptly discharged from a hospital to a nursing home that lost him! He went without water for so long that he developed renal failure. Those are just a couple of the calamities that Marcy encountered in caring for her parents, as described in her book, The Gift of Caring: Saving Our Parents from the Perils of Modern Healthcare. Co-author and geriatrician Dr. Elizabeth Eckstrom spells out how family caregivers might limit the harms. What’s missing? Effective anger! What happened is intolerable. But we need useful strategies that mobilize political force to insist upon change!
The problems in the care of the elderly are not “errors” in the usual sense of mistakes. In fact, they are baked right into our current delivery system. It was not simply that a nurse or aide slipped up on some critical step. Instead, all the nurses and aides and everyone else are working in a system that is so dysfunctional that actions that cause pain or neglect are not even called out as errors. Consider the profound error of simply not knowing what matters most to patients and their loved ones. Consider that patients have to use the emergency room, because that’s all we offer when things go badly, not on-call physicians or substitute caregivers who can deal with problems at home. Consider that we don’t have home-delivered meals for many elderly persons in need in most of the country; the wait lists often take more than 6 months, because we have not chosen to fund the Older Americans Act adequately. This is unacceptable! How can we complain effectively? Each family somehow believes that its situation is just bad luck or “how things are.” People have no benchmark by which to set expectations, so they accept the errors, suffering, and impoverishment that so often come with disabilities in old age.
Let’s change that. Let’s start raising the issues everywhere that we can: in the newspapers, in the candidate debates, when your Congressional representatives are in town, and in social media. Let’s build some highly reliable, person-centered elder care systems in our communities and see what it really costs. Let’s figure out how family caregivers can become politically powerful.
We’ve started an initiative to get family caregiver issues on the party platforms in all the states that generate party platforms. You can join the Family Caregiver Platform Project effort. It takes very little time and gets leaders talking. Go to http://caregivercorps.org to sign up. Tell them your stories, and fire up the anger. What else can you think of? We need other leverage points that would focus the pent-up frustration of millions of family members who have already witnessed the misery of ordinary elder care. That is a story that we can all absorb and tell others, and then we can go out and insist that our care system change. If we are lucky, we will all grow old. So it’s our future, too, not just our parents’!
Read more about refusing to tolerate errors in eldercare in our blog at MediCaring.org
Most Americans will be misdiagnosed at least once
A panel at the Institute of Medicine urges communication between clinicians and patients to help reduce diagnostic errors.
Read the full article here:
Most Americans will be misdiagnosed at least once
Final Recommendation Statement: Behavioral and Pharmacotherapy Interventions for Tobacco Smoking Cessation in Adults, Including Pregnant Women
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released today a final recommendation statement on behavioral and pharmacotherapy interventions for tobacco smoking cessation in adults, including pregnant women. To view the recommendation and the evidence on which it is based, please go to
http://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/Page/Document/UpdateSummaryFinal/tobacco-use-in-adults-and-pregnant-women-counseling-and-interventions. A fact sheet that explains the final recommendation in plain language is also available. The final recommendation statement can also be found in the September 22 online issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.
Apps and Wearables in Healthcare – What Works? [From Our Partner]
To succeed in patient engagement, healthcare providers must embrace mobile. But how to prioritize the various innovative trends in mobile technology? What works, and what does not? In this new whitepaper, we share the latest research and the most successful mobile use cases:
A comprehensive guide for healthcare executives on:
- Hospital Apps and their Role in Patient Engagement.
- The State of Wearables in Healthcare – Time to Make a Move?
- 6 Proven Steps to Develop an Efficient Mobile Use Case.
Make informed decisions and build a successful mobile strategy for your organization!
The Deans’ Genes and Precision Medicine: A Journey of Discovery and Hope
By: Don Dean, Spartanburg, South Carolina
One tumor is a difficult thing to face. Imagine having nearly 100.
Like my father, aunt, uncle and other relatives, I have a very rare hereditary condition where a mutation in what is called the MET gene causes cancerous tumors to continuously grow in my kidneys. Since my first visit to the National Institutes of Health in 1992, I’ve had to have one kidney removed and nearly 100 tumors excised from the other.
I lost my father and other relatives to this disease, but thanks to new advances in medicine, that doesn’t have to be my fate.
What I did not know at the time was that I was to be part of cutting edge science and medical care that’s become known as Precision Medicine. Precision medicine refers to treatments, therapies, and care tailored to individual patients. By looking at people’s specific genes and lifestyles, doctors and scientists, like those at NIH, can get the right treatment to the right person.
HHS hosts 50-state convening focused on preventing opioid overdose and opioid use disorder, takes important step to increase access to treatment
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell today kicked off a two-day intensive convening of representatives from all 50 states and Washington, DC focused on preventing opioid overdose and opioid use disorder. During her remarks, the secretary announced that HHS will move to expand access to medication-assisted treatment (MAT) by revising the regulations related to the prescribing of buprenorphine to treat opioid dependence. She also announced $1.8 million in awards to rural communities to expand access to naloxone – a drug that reverses an opioid overdose.
US Surgeon General launches campaign with National Call to Action on Walking
The United States Surgeon General today issued a call to action to address major public health challenges such as heart disease and diabetes. Step It Up! The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Promote Walking and Walkable Communities articulates the health benefits of walking while addressing the fact that many communities unacceptably lack safe and convenient places for individuals to walk or wheelchair roll.
Symposium New Dimensions on Sustainable U.S. Health Spending
The video of the symposium may be viewed on the Altarum Institute website.
On this Web page you will also see the PowerPoint presentations plus resources from the prior symposia.
Creating Patient-Centered Team-Based Care
The event recording is now on-demand, should you like to view it.
Use the link below to enter the webcast at any time.
WEBCAST LINK: http://event.on24.com/wcc/r/1029976/9D6A71170580605842F055BF91549D85
In Case You Missed It
You can also view recordings of our most recent webinars by clicking them below:
- April 30, 2015: “Harnessing the Power of Your EHR for Quality Improvement”
- February 26, 2015: “Introducing AHRQ’s Expanded Practice Facilitation Training Curriculum”
- January 29, 2015: “Engaging patients as partners in care: How practice facilitators can support patient engagement”
- December 18, 2014: “Supporting Leaders to Promote Quality and Patient Safety: How practice facilitators can work with practice leadership to support a culture of safety and quality”
- October 21, 2014: “Training practice facilitators to help primary care practices improve use of health information technology”
- August 14, 2014: “Case Studies of Exemplar Primary Care Practice Facilitation Training Programs”
If you have comments or questions, please contact us at PracticeFacilitation@mathematica-mpr.com.