Maggie Clark reported this story with the support of the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism and the National Health Journalism Fellowship, programs of USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism....
Healthcare Systems & Policy
Medicare recently announced it is likely to cover a diabetes prevention program that has been shown to be highly effective. Our Slow Medicine team explains why that’s exciting news for pre-diabetic patients.
Just before President Obama announced a new set of new initiatives to boost access to addiction treatment this week, a four-part series on NPR looked at the opioid epidemic's smallest victims, and what can be done to improve their care.
"It’s around 10 p.m. when I call a crisis worker for victims of domestic violence in remote Northern California," writes reporter Emily Cureton. "I’m panicking, 150 miles away in Oregon. I’m really afraid someone is going to get hurt tonight."
So-called "surprise bills" can leave unsuspecting patients on the hook for thousands of dollars. And market solutions haven't fixed the problem so far, writes UCLA health policy expert Gerald Kominski.
The case of Dr. Reinaldo de los Heros illustrates a troubling tendency for critical information about a physician to go missing. State medical boards could do much more to keep the online paper trail intact over time.
California’s jails were built to hold inmates for relatively short sentences — usually just a few months. But now local law enforcement is grappling with how to hold offenders for long periods of time, which is having an impact on mentally ill inmates.
“Open data, to my mind, is about empowering communities with numbers presented in useful ways that can help fuel real-world change,” writes CHCF's Andy Krackov. Here he offers some tips on how we can make that happen.
Upwards of two-thirds of uninsured kids in the U.S. are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP, but aren’t enrolled. New research suggests parent mentors could be a highly effective solution to getting more low-income kids insured, with potentially huge cost savings.
Finding out about a doctor's record from state medical boards isn't as easy as it should be. Consider the story of Kelly Deyo, who died of a prescription overdose last year. Her doctor's record spans four states, but the details aren't easy to unearth.