OBJECTIVE Medicare Part B physician payment indicates a cost to Medicare beneficiaries for a physician service and connotes physician clinical productivity. The objective of this study was to determine whether there was an association between practice arrangement and Medicare physician payment. STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional study. SETTING Medicare provider utilization and payment data. SUB...

Patients can hold physicians directly or vicariously liable for the malpractice of nurse practitioners under their supervision. Restrictive scope-of-practice laws governing nurse practitioners can ease patients' legal burdens in establishing physician liability. We analyze the effect of restrictive scope-of-practice laws on the number of malpractice payments made on behalf of physicians between...

CONTEXT Medicare's Incentive Payment (MIP) program provides a 10% bonus payment to providers who treat Medicare patients in rural and urban areas where there is a shortage of generalist physicians. PURPOSE To examine the experience of Alaska, Idaho, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Washington with the MIP program. We determined the program's utilization and which types of physicians receiv...

Background One of the objectives of the health transformation plan (HTP) in Iran is to reduce out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for inpatient services and eradicate informal payments. The HTP has three phases: the first phase (launched in May 5, 2014) is focused on reducing OOP payments for inpatient services; the second phase (launched in May 22, 2014) is focused on primary healthcare (PHC) and the...

With more than 354 million unscheduled acute care visits annually in the United States, emergency departments (EDs) and emergency physicians (EPs) are critical to the care and cost of care provided to patients. Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the piloting of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), EDs and more specifically, emergency physicians will have an even greater ro...

A retrospective analysis of the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) Public Use Data File was performed on anesthesia-related malpractice payments from 2004 to 2010. Anesthesia-related allegations, malpractice act or omission codes, severity of injury, and cost were assessed. The NPDB captured 369 anesthesia-related malpractice payments associated with Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists ...