Letter from the Editor #660

We have spent many an hour helping you learn about the new ways that reimbursement will be changing to reward providers that provide the best care. This applies to hospitals as well. Healthgrades, a healthcare quality reporting group, has released a list of 262 hospitals that represent the nation’s elite when it comes to risk-adjusted mortality and complication rates for 27 common procedures and conditions involving Medicare patients.

These hospitals, the top 5% of the nearly 4,500 graded by the group, posted mortality rates for 18 procedures and conditions from 2009 through 2011 that were 30.9% lower than those for all the others, and for many of them this translated into more money. If the remaining 95% of the hospitals had performed just as well during this period, more than 164,000 Medicare patients might not have died, according to Healthgrades.

To be eligible for a Clinical Excellence award, a hospital must have been evaluated for its performance in at least 19 of the 27 procedures and conditions based on Medicare inpatient data in the Medicare Provider Analysis and Review database. Roughly 1,500 hospitals made this initial cut. To learn if a hospital you refer patients to qualifies as a Clinical Excellence Winner just follow this link.

It seems like every time I am teaching a class there are some patients who want to discuss which sweetener is the best. I hear things like "artificial sweeteners make you crave sugar more" or "fruit sugar is the best because it is all natural." These comments can cause our patients to misunderstand our message. To help clarify this question researchers from Yale University studied the differing effects of various sugars on the brain and found that glucose appears to temper brain activity in regions that regulate appetite and reward but fructose does not. Check out Item #5 to learn more. 

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Dave Joffe, Editor-in-chief