LAS VEGASData can and should be used to make care better, said Andrew M. Wiesenthal, MD, director at Deloitte Consulting and former national physician leader for Kaiser Permanentes HealthConnect project, during a Feb. 20 presentation at the 2012 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference.

Incorporating a patient's family history into the cardiovascular (CV) risk assessment mix can help identify more patients with risk and could improve prevention tactics, according to a study published in the Feb. 21 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The hospital is a peculiar business. It is multipronged and loses business on a lot of procedures but it has to keep doing them. It loses money on Medicaid patients and makes money on private patients.

Allowing people to purchase over-the-counter (OTC) medications at local drugstores provides the U.S. healthcare system $102 billion in profits annually, and each dollar spent on OTCs saves $6 to $7 for the healthcare system, according to a white paper released Jan. 31 by Consumer Healthcare Products Association. Without OTCs, an additional 56,000 medical practitioners would be needed to assist with the increase in office visits, which would not bode well for the current physician shortage.

STEMI patients treated with bivalirudin therapy during PCI had better inpatient outcomes and lower overall in-hospital costs than patients treated with heparin plus glycoprotein IIb/IIIa receptor inhibition (GPI), according to a retrospective cohort study published online Jan. 10 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. Results from this real world study confirm findings in clinical trials and show use of bivalirudin therapy may provide savings of $1,300 per admission, the authors wrote.

In order to provide quality cardiovascular care and continue to make headway in improving outcomes, it is necessary to develop middle-ground policy positions related to the future design of more sustainable Medicare and Medicaid programs.

With more than 26 million Americans suffering from diabetes and 79 million at risk for developing the comorbidity, working to thwart the disease and its associated costs should take center stage in preventive medicine. However, can disease prevention programs, which are often time-consuming and costly, make a dent in the epidemic? Research published in the January issue of Health Affairs showed that a community-based lifestyle intervention program could prevent nearly 885,000 cases of type 2 diabetes and save $5.7 billion over the next 25 years.

Evidence-based decision support programs may be able to reduce the number of unnecessary CT pulmonary angiographic exams used to evaluate pulmonary emboli in the emergency department, according to a study published online Dec. 20 in Radiology.