In 2017, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will apply a downward payment adjustment to those who did not satisfactorily report for the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) in 2015 including: Individual eligible...
The 2015 Annual Quality and Resource Use Reports (QRURs) were released on September 26. These reports show how physician groups and physician solo practitioners performed in 2015 on the quality and cost measures used to calculate the 2017 Value...
The HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has a new Nursing Home Antimicrobial Stewardship Guide , a research-based resource with step-by-step instructions and materials to help nursing homes improve antibiotic use and decrease harm...
We read with interest the article by Zahirovic et al.1 The article is informative; however, the authors’ suggestion that because the setting was a nursing home for patients with dementia, all of the elderly patients fulfilled the basic dementia...
Although geriatric syndromes have been studied extensively, their interactions with one another and their accumulated effects on life expectancy are less frequently discussed. This study examined whether geriatric syndromes and their cumulative...
There is a recent consensus proposal of “cognitive frailty” defined by the presence of both physical frailty and cognitive impairment in the absence of dementia. The relevance, validity, and utilization of cognitive frailty, however, is presently...
“All of us need to undo some long-term brainwashing that makes people think that antibiotics can do everything or that they can’t hurt. We have to help people move from thinking about antibiotics as something to use ‘just in case’ to ‘only when...
On November 2, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized the 2017 Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) final rule that recognizes the importance of primary care by improving payment for chronic care management and behavioral health...
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is tracking the progress of the National Partnership to Improve Dementia Care in Nursing Homes by reviewing publicly reported measures. The official measure is the percentage of long-stay...
