This past Wednesday, more than 1.3 million Georgians began the Open Enrollment period for Medicare. It’s a time for seniors and people with disabilities to look through their choices for the government program’s coverage. In a new GHN Commentary, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services urges Medicare beneficiaries to take their time in assessing the…
Fall is a wonderful time of year. Changing leaves. Cooler weather. It’s also the season for people with Medicare to review their current Medicare coverage, as Medicare Open Enrollment begins. As we prepare for Medicare Open Enrollment, which began on Oct. 15 and ends on Dec. 7, Medicare wants everyone to know that quality continues to…
Georgia has reduced its use of antipsychotic medications on nursing home residents by 26 percent, one of the largest drops in the nation. The decrease, occurring from the end of 2011 to the end of 2013, was powered in part by a pilot program targeting the Georgia nursing homes that had the highest use of…
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia is dropping its Medicare Advantage plan for next year for retirees in the State Health Benefit Plan. That means UnitedHealthcare will be the sole provider of the Advantage plans for 2015. (Blue Cross is the sole provider for 2014.) The Georgia Department of Community Health is informing retiree…
Freestanding emergency departments have been proposed in Georgia as a potential solution for struggling rural hospitals, or newly closed ones, that want to remain operational in downsized form to help patients in need. But the trend toward such standalone emergency rooms nationally is totally different from that picture, members of the Georgia Rural Hospital Stabilization…
“Meaningful use.” It’s another confounding term in the often opaque lexicon of health care. But it represents a concept that is important for health care providers’ bottom lines. The basic idea is that Medicare and Medicaid will pay incentives for hospitals and doctors to demonstrate “meaningful use” of electronic health records (EHRs) to improve patient…
Georgia improved on several important health measures from 2007 to 2012, but its overall health care ranking among states fell from 35th to 45th in a newly released study. The Commonwealth Fund’s 2014 state health system scorecard, released Wednesday, found that all states saw meaningful improvement on at least seven of 34 indicators. Georgia improved on…
While recently sharing a seafood dinner, three of my old high school friends and I also shared an inventory of our medical conditions. “Old’’ is a relative term. We’re in our early 60s. And our annual reunion is a golf vacation in Florida, so we’re mobile enough to get around the links (and send too many…
The wife of a retired Atlanta physician recently got a stunning lesson when her husband spent some time in a hospital. “We realized there might be a problem when he was not served breakfast along with the other patients,” she said. That was when they were told he had not actually been admitted to the…
Hospital readmissions are bad for everyone. They’re obviously bad for discharged patients. No one wants to leave the hospital, get worse instead of better and then have to be hospitalized again. Readmissions are also bad for the hospitals involved, because they can be penalized by Medicare for a high readmission rate within 30 days of…