health care providers

Americans pay more, get less for health care

Americans spend considerably more money on health care services than any other industrialized nation, but the increased expenditure does not buy more care, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They found that the United States spent 44 percent more on health care than Switzerland, the nation with the next highest per capita health care costs, in the year 2000. At the same time, Americans had fewer physician visits and hospital stays were shorter compared to most other industrialized nations. The study suggests that the difference in spending is caused mostly by higher prices for health care goods and services in the United States. The results are published in the May/June 2003, edition of the journal Health Affair.

Rapid increase of opioids benefits some dying pediatric cancer patients

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that terminally ill children with cancer who have neuropathic pain require more opioids during the final days of life than those without neuropathic pain. In addition, the team found preliminary evidence that a “cocktail” of several narcotics was significantly more effective at treating these patients than dramatically increasing the dosage of two commonly used opioids — morphine and benzodiazepine.

New Web-based journal focuses on medical errors

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality launched a monthly peer-reviewed, Web-based medical journal that showcases patient safety lessons drawn from actual cases of medical errors. Called AHRQ WebM&M (Morbidity and Mortality Rounds on the Web), the Web-based journal (http://webmm.ahrq.gov) was developed to educate health care providers about medical errors in a blame-free environment. In hospitals across the country, clinicians routinely hold Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conferences to discuss specific cases that raise issues regarding medical errors and quality improvement. Until now, there has been no comparable national or international forum to discuss and learn from medical errors.

Pain, poor coping skills diminish quality of life for HIV patients

HIV patients who live in pain and use poor coping strategies to handle the stress of their illness also report that they have less energy and more limits on their physical, social and work activities, according to a new study. Patients who use self-distraction techniques or “give up trying to deal with” HIV-related stress feel less energetic, and those who use self-distraction or drugs or alcohol to cope say that their health limits their social activities, according to Mark Vosvick, Ph.D., of the University of North Texas and colleagues.

Study: 15 percent of pregnant women drink alcohol

Despite widespread warnings about the potential risk of drinking alcohol during pregnancy, fifteen percent of pregnant women in a newly published study said they had drunk alcohol at least once during their pregnancies. And although most of those women reported on an anonymous survey that they’d had less than one drink a week, some acknowledged drinking more than that on a regular basis, or said they’d had at least one binge of five or more drinks at once.

Baby Boomers not aging well

Most baby-boomers are not aging well, and as they enter their golden years, the burden and cost of their health care will only increase according to a new Emory University study that found only one in five adults has good, comprehensive mental and physical health. Baby-boomers composed the largest demographic portion of the survey, and a majority of them fell within the “incompletely healthy” category, signaling that only a few are aging with their health intact, and many have the potential to develop serious illnesses, says Corey Lee Keyes, lead researcher and assistant professor of sociology at Emory. The study appears in the November/December issue of the “American Journal of Health Promotion.”