Clinical Conversations

August 23rd, 2019

Podcast 230 — Hospital-readmissions gaming?

The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP for short) seems to be reducing 30-day readmissions — but what about revisits to facilities within those 30 days? Rishi Wadhera and his co-authors measured readmissions, plus treat-and-discharge ER visits, plus stays in observation units among some 3 million Medicare discharges of a near-4-year span. They found that broadening the […]

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July 10th, 2016

Podcast 204: Medical marijuana’s effect on Medicare prescriptions

[Note: a transcript of this interview will be added in a few days’ time.] Our guest has strong indirect evidence that medical marijuana has been replacing “standard” drugs in states where it is legal. In doing so, the substitution is saving the Medicare system modest amounts of money. Their evidence, published in Health Affairs, comes from an […]

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September 27th, 2015

Podcast 185: A Spirited Discussion on Medicare’s ‘Doc Fix’ Fix for Reimbursement

A group of physicians, economists, and medical students gathered on Medstro to talk about Medicare’s solution to the decades-old “doc fix” problem — it’s how you get paid for caring for Medicare patients. The chat was occasioned by an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine by Meredith Rosenthal, an economist and a close observer […]

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