Recent Commonwealth Fund–supported articles in the peer-reviewed literature examine:
- hospital strategies associated with higher survival rates for hospitalized heart attack patients (American Heart Journal, Dec. 2011);
- a way to distinguish planned from unplanned hospital readmissions, for the purposes of accurate measurement of avoidable readmissions (Archives of Internal Medicine, Dec. 12, 2011);
- whether hospital quality is inversely associated with the proportion of minority patients served (Inquiry, Fall 2011);
- the perspectives of frontline staff on whether many transfers from nursing homes to hospitals are avoidable (Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Sept. 2011); and
- the length of well-child visits and its relationship with the content of the visit and parents’ satisfaction with care (Pediatrics, Oct. 1, 2011).
In another article, 2008–09 Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice Christopher Millet, Ph.D., M.Sc., M.Phil., and colleagues call for better measures to assess how well patients are protected from the financial consequences of illness (PloS Medicine, Sept. 2011). An article by 1998–99 Harkness Fellow Mary Seddon and colleagues describes a successful effort to reduce central line–associated bloodstream infections in one New Zealand institution (New Zealand Medical Journal, July 29, 2011).
In a recent analysis, Commonwealth Fund senior policy analyst Mark Zezza, Ph.D., and colleagues found similar variations in spending and inpatient admissions by both Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, the state’s largest health insurer, and Medicare (American Journal of Managed Care, Dec. 2011).
