MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Obama administration "Partnership" seeks to cut health care costs, medical errors. The Obama administration announced a broad initiative yesterday to reduce medical errors though a partnership of private insurers, business leaders, hospitals and patient advocates.
The program, Partnership for Patients: Better Care, Lower Costs, is designed to get different entities and individuals involved in patient care to work together to save lives and money by reducing medical errors, injuries and complications that are preventable.
"Through strong partnerships at national, regional, state and local levels — including the public sector and some of the nation’s largest companies — we are supporting the hospital community to significantly reduce harm to patients," said Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Dr. Donald Berwick in prepared remarks.
The program has the potential to save 60,000 lives and save up to $35 billion in health care costs, including up to $10 billion for Medicare, according to the Dept. of Health & Human Services, which oversees the initiative.
"With new tools provided by the Affordable Care Act, we can aggressively implement programs that will help hospitals reduce preventable errors," said Berwick.
HHS intends to provide hospitals with incentives to improve the quality of care, and provide assistance to providers and hospitals to support efforts to reduce errors, he said.
Report: Babies not properly shielded from X-rays at Brooklyn hospital. Long after a SUNY hospital said it had stopped over-radiating premature babies, state inspectors found that some inappropriate X-rays were still being administered as recently as January, according to The New York Times.
Organogenesis breaks ground on living cell plant. Organogenesis today began construction on what it said will be the world’s largest automated living cell manufacturing plant. Mass. Life Sciences Center CEO Susan Windham-Bannister joined state and local officials, Organogenesis Inc. CEO Geoff MacKay and his company’s employees to celebrate the start of construction on the facility, the company announced.
Study: Weight-loss surgery reduces health care costs. The UK’s first large-scale study on of weight-loss surgery showed a large reduction in type 2 diabetes, according to the BBC. The U.K.’s National Bariatric Surgery Registry also said the operations are good value because the cost of bariatric surgery is recouped within three years of surgery as it prevents other health conditions with are expensive to treat.
Half of adult Americans take supplements, says CDC. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showed that about half of U.S. adults take vitamins and other dietary supplements, and the level has been steady for much of the past decade, writes The Associated Press.
