Health affairs
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Physicians contend that the threat of malpractice lawsuits forces them to practice defensive medicine, which in turn raises the cost of health care. This argument underlies efforts to change malpractice laws through legislative tort reform. ⋯ We also found relatively modest differences in physicians' concerns across states with and without common tort reforms. These results suggest that many policies aimed at controlling malpractice costs may have a limited effect on physicians' malpractice concerns.
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Provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act authorize incentive payments to hospitals and clinicians who become "meaningful users" of health information technology (IT). We argue that various private-sector entities--commercial payers, employers, consumer groups, health care ratings organizations, large provider organizations, and regulatory bodies--can further accelerate health IT adoption by implementing strategies that are complementary to the Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs. This paper describes these strategies and potential approaches to implementation.
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The first decade of the patient safety movement achieved some real gains, focused as it was on adverse events amenable to systemwide solutions, such as infections associated with health care and medication errors. However, diagnostic errors, although common and often serious, have not received comparable attention. ⋯ Health information technology, better training, and increasing acknowledgment of the problem hold some promise. As approaches to measuring, preventing, and mitigating harm from diagnostic errors are proven to work, it will be important to integrate these approaches into policy initiatives to improve patient safety.