Research Headlines

Interest in reducing costly and dangerous medical mistakes made in hospitals has grown in recent years, especially with new advances in health information technology (HIT). Journalist Ted Burnham, recently noted on the NPR: Health Blog that an estimated one in seven hospital patients will suffer some form of error in their care. Approximately one-third of those are prescription drug related.

Recently, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released a study showing the concentration of health care costs among a relatively small proportion of the population.¹ Writing in The Atlantic Monthly and describing the study results, Jordan Weissmann notes that the top 5 percent of spenders accounted for about half of all health care spending in the United States and had an annual average of $35,829 in medical

Among recent developments in the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Secretary of Health and Human Service’s decision to give states significant discretion in prescribing which benefits insurers must offer generated significant media attention. As described by Robert Pear in the New York Times, the ACA requir