Accountable care organizations were among the key initiatives of the Affordable Care Act, designed to help control soaring Medicare costs. ACOs were expected to save the government nearly $5 billion by 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Researchers from the Queen Mary University of London have been awarded £2 million to study how to improve asthma in African children. The investment from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is part of its Global Health Research Program and will fund the three-year project 'Achieving Control of Asthma in Children In Africa' (ACACIA) taking place in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Malawi and Zimbabwe.
Pediatric asthma takes a heavy toll on patients and families alike. Affecting more than 7 million children in the U.S., it's the most common nonsurgical diagnosis for pediatric hospital admission, with costs of more than $570 million annually.
Understanding how to care for these young patients has significantly improved in the last several decades, leading the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to issue evidence-based guidelines on pediatric asthma in 1990. Despite knowing more about this respiratory ailment, overall morbidity–measured by attack rates, pediatric emergency department visits or hospitalizations–has not decreased over the last decade.
Asthma outcomes still vary widely across England and appear to be influenced by region and affluence despite falling rates of asthma deaths, emergency hospital admissions and prevalence, suggests a study published in the journal Thorax. However, it appears that amongst younger people, asthma deaths rates are falling in the poorest parts of the population compared with the wealthiest.
Quebecers are not created equal when it comes to accessing anti-retroviral treatment (ART) for HIV and AIDS, a long-term study undertaken by a team from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) in Montreal has revealed.
Researchers observed that HIV-infected persons who count on social assistance and other income security programs in Quebec do not have early access to ART due to their presumed lower socio-economic status.
Doctors performing general practitioner surgery who also have training in complementary and alternative medicines appear to be less likely to prescribe antibiotics to patients and may hold the key to reducing over-prescribing of these drugs.
A recent study demonstrated that older adults hyper bind distracting names and attended faces, which produces better learning of these face-name pairs when they reappear on a memory test, to reduce older adults’ cognitive disorder.
Several hematologic malignancies occur after organ transplantation mostly posttransplantation lymphoproliferative disorders and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Treatment exists for this, but survival could not be as good as in the general population.
The current study does not support the view that, independently of health status, older patients with lower levels of social support place greater demands on ambulatory care. Future research on social relationships would benefit from a consensus on clinically relevant concepts to measure.
According to this study, researchers determined that patients discharged from heart failure (HF) hospitalizations are more than 40% more likely to be rehospitalized within 30 days if they are admitted to hospitals' general medicine services than to their cardiology services. The study was published in the American Journal of Cardiology.
New research from Europe showed cycling and mixing, two strategies for rotating antibiotics, do not differ significantly in their impact on the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant gram-negative bacteria in the ICU. The study findings were published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases
Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) need improved access to care for a variety of reasons, most notably because there is a shortage of healthcare professionals in the field, according to the survey published in the Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Nurse practitioners (NPs) could provide that access, the researchers wrote.