Study: Medicare Spends Less When Beneficiaries Get Surgery at High-Quality Hospitals
<p>Previous research shows that use of postacute care services like skilled nursing home care can explain a lot of the variation seen in Medicare spending across the country. Now a new <em>Health Affairs</em> study indicates that spending on postacute services may be at least partly driven by the underlying quality of care received by surgical patients while in the hospital. </p><p>The research team, led by Harvard’s Thomas C. Tsai, M.D., and Ashish K. Jha, M.D., and including former Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow Felix Greaves, tested the hypothesis that patients who get high-quality surgical and postoperative care will have fewer medical complications and require fewer costly postacute services than patients treated at lower-quality hospitals.</p>
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletters/ealerts/2016/sep/medicare-spends-less Read more