Publications

Are Medicare Advantage plans’ provider networks associated with beneficiaries’ receiving care from primary care clinicians with lower rates of avoidable hospital stays?

This article is the latest in the Health Affairs Forefront series, Provider Prices in the Commercial Sector, featuring analysis and discussion of physician, hospital, and other health care provider prices in the private-sector markets and their contribution to overall spending therein.

Since the 2007 landmark report on Preventing Medication Errors from the US National Academy of Medicine, effective interventions have been developed to address medication errors.1 Despite this, medication errors persist as the most common source of harm for patients worldwide.2 In hospitals, adverse drug events are the most common adverse events, accounting in one large study for 39% of all events.3 Medication errors in ambulatory care settings are also an ongoing patient safety challenge.4

As artificial intelligence (AI) applications become more pervasive, it is critical to understand how knowledge workers with different levels and types of experience can team with AI for productivity gains. We focus on the influence of two major types of human work experience (narrow experience based on the specific task volume and broad experience based on seniority) on the human-AI team dynamics.

We use data from a long-running experiment in which American Indian households received income transfers from a casino while other households did not

Public pay-for-performance (P4P) programs tie hospital payments to predetermined sets of quality measures and are intended to encourage or discourage certain outcomes

Diagnostic effort, diagnostic testing, physician payment, healthcare operations management, artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) applications in healthcare could have algorithmic biases that perpetuate health disparities.

Policy makers and insurers promote the use of generic drugs because they can deliver large savings without sacrificing quality. But these efforts meet resistance from the public, who perceive generic drugs as inferior substitutes for brand name counterparts. Building on literature showing that negative emotions reduce risk-taking, the authors hypothesize that receiving bad medical news (i.e., negative information about one’s health) prompts patients to favor brand name over generic drugs as means to safeguard their health. The evidence exploits low-density lipoprotein cholesterol test results, where a discontinuity from clinical guidelines enables the authors to estimate the causal effect of bad medical news.

There is increased acceptance that social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDH) impact health outcomes, but electronic health records (EHRs) are not always set up to capture the full range of SBDH variables in a systematic manner. The purpose of this study was to explore rates and trends of social history (SH) data collection—1 element of SBDH—in a structured portion of an EHR within a large academic integrated delivery system.