Austin Frakt

Stephanie Hegarty writes that requiring eight, unbroken hours of sleep is a myth. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week […]

Ken Kizer’s recent Journal of the American Medical Association piece is a quick way to get up to speed on what the Affordable Care Act could mean for the Veterans Health Administration and the population it serves. It may puzzle some that there should be a connection at all. Don’t all veterans get VA care […]

The First Cornerstone of value-driven healthcare is widespread adoption of interoperable HIT [health information technology] to facilitate, among other things, reducing medical errors, enhancing the provision of evidence-based healthcare, and increasing administrative efficiency in healthcare delivery. […] The Second Cornerstone of value-driven healthcare is measuring and publishing information about healthcare quality. […] The Third Cornerstone […]

By Zack Weiner via @pckilgore. [Cross-posted at The Incidental Economist]

From What We Talk about When We Talk about Health Care Costs, by Peter J. Neumann: The problem is that no one in charge seems willing to acknowledge that getting a handle on cost growth will also involve uncomfortable trade-offs. We cannot as a society provide patients with unlimited access and unlimited choice. Providing better-quality […]

Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) have introduced The Seniors’ Choice Act. It includes a variant of premium support and a whole lot more. As with all these things, the devil is in the details and not all the details are clear from what’s been released. Several documents describe various aspects of The […]

Via USA Today. [Cross-posted at The Incidental Economist]

I pointed out in one of my “It’s been a great century” posts that not all of the reduction in cardiovascular disease specific mortality is due to medical interventions. My other “It’s been a great century” post focused on great strides in public health, which deserves much of the credit for our longer lives. It’s […]

After documenting the rapid rise in number of clinical studies, authors of the Institute of Medicine’s Knowing What Works in Health Care (page 36) conclude, For physicians—and patients—who are motivated enough to read through and assess all of the relevant individual clinical studies on their own, keeping current is an arduous, if not impossible, task. […]

Something rare happened to me on Wednesday. In the span of a few hours a post I co-authored with Aaron Carroll published on the Journal of the American Medical Association’s blog, and a commentary I co-authored with Henry Aaron published in the New England Journal of Medicine. This turned out to be a great, admittedly […]