News Archive: Aging and Health
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2005
Quality of care indicators developed for elderly surgical patients — Dec. 2005
Increasing numbers of elderly patients are undergoing surgery in the U.S., and efforts are underway to increase the quality of their surgical care. This project developed process-based quality measures to help identify and achieve high-quality care for elderly surgical patients undergoing abdominal operations.
Read abstract
More on quality of care research
Medicare payment changes and their effects on elderly patients — Oct. 2005
Changes in the Medicare system of payment may provide incentives for medical care facilities to provide efficient care, but it may also encourage compromises in patient care in an effort to increase revenue.
Full document
Older patients who need time-consuming medical care are at risk for lower quality — Oct. 2005
Findings suggest that the quality of medical care received among older patients is not associated with age, vulnerability, gender, or other sociodemographic factors. Instead, older patients with conditions that required more history-taking, counseling, and medication-prescribing received lower quality of care.
Older patients reduce alcohol consumption after getting personalized medical information — Oct. 2005
Providing physicians and older patients with patient education that includes personalized reports of drinking risks and benefits can effectively reduce their alcohol consumption and other drinking risks.
Chronic disease self-management programs may be effective for some conditions — Sep. 2005
This study provides an assessment of the effectiveness of self-management programs for the chronic conditions of hypertension, osteoarthritis, and diabetes in older adults. Such programs may be effective for certain conditions, but it is unclear what the essential components are for these programs to work.
Lower quality medical care linked to earlier death among vulnerable older patients — Aug. 2005
Older patients at risk of declining health who received lower quality medical care were more likely to die after three years than peers who received higher quality health care.
RAND author discusses health care reform for sick and elderly patients at the end of life — Aug. 2005
In an interview with the Kaiser Family Foundation, RAND author Joanne Lynn discusses the current system of caring for the sick and elderly in the final phase of life and recommends improvements for both patients and providers.
See interview at kaisernetwork.org
Coalition for the continuum of care — Jul. 2005
On July 19, 2005, RAND is co-sponsoring an aging solutions forum. Three panels of nationally recognized experts will discuss reforms that would ensure continuous and comprehensive health care for the elderly.Need for eye care among older adults with diabetes in fee-for-service and managed medicare — May 2005
In a a random sample of Medicare beneficiaries older than 65, the authors compared rates of need for individual eye care among Medicare beneficiaries with network-model Medicare+Choice (MC) and fee-for-service (FFS) health insurance. The data suggest high rates of unrecognized and untreated eye diseases among Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in both FFS and MC and significantly higher rates of need for care among MC participants.
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