PHILADELPHIA, June 13, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Health
services researchers who studied controversial aspects of Medicare
spending and quality of patient care received a prestigious award
yesterday from the nation’s largest health services research
professional association.
The organization, AcademyHealth, presented its 2011 Article of
the Year Award to Jeffrey H. Silber, M.D., Ph.D., director of the
Center for Outcomes Research at The Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia, and his collaborator, Robert Kaestner, Ph.D., of the
University of Illinois at Chicago. The award presentation occurred
yesterday at AcademyHealth’s Annual Research Meeting in
Seattle.
The Article of the Year Award recognized two companion studies
by Silber and Kaestner: “Aggressive Treatment Style and Surgical
Outcomes,” published in the December 2010 issue of the journal
Health Services Research, and “Evidence on the Efficacy of
Inpatient Spending on Medicare Patients,” published the same month
in The Milbank Quarterly.
As an indicator of aggressive care, Silber and Kaestner used the
Dartmouth Index, a prominent set of measures of inpatient spending
on elderly patients. In studying over 5 million Medicare admissions
for various surgeries between 2000 and 2005, they found that
surgical patients in hospitals with a more aggressive treatment
style were less likely to die within 30 days of admission compared
to patients in less aggressive hospitals. They also found that this
benefit was stable, persisting after the 30-day mark.
Silber, who is a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of
Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, said that these
findings contradicted cost-cutting arguments made by those who
assert that patients would not be harmed by reductions in Medicare
spending. “People have recently argued that more spending
does not yield gains in quality of care,” said Silber. “Our study
suggests that
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