Medicare is now reporting actual risk-adjusted mortality rates for pneumonia, MI, and heart failure. The topic must be important, since ''Talk of the Nation'' spent 30 minutes yesterday interviewing Don Berwick and me about it… on the day of Hillary’s speech!To listen to the show, click here. Also, here’s an article from USA Today that got the ...

August 11th was the 2nd anniversary of the epic implosion of George Allen's presidential campaign, the first defeat at the hands of YouTube. Two recent videos of unattended patients dying in ER waiting rooms leave me wondering whether healthcare has also entered the YouTube era.Remember the George Allen fiasco? A 20-year-old Indian-American named ...

Last week, Medicare added patient satisfaction data to its hospital reporting website. This is progress, but it raises an interesting question: should patient satisfaction scores be case-mix adjusted?The motivation to include patient satisfaction data comes from the Institute of Medicine’s inclusion of “patient-centeredness” as one key component ...

Here's the link, featuring, among others, celebrity blogger Kevin, M.D., as well as yours truly, batting clean-up. Although the privacy concerns raised by the story are real, personally I thought the psychiatrist went a bit overboard when she said,''If you are unhappy with the people that you're supposed to be serving and taking care of, you ...