the article by cheri wilson, “patient safety and healthcare quality: the case for language access”, highlights 
the challenges of providing culturally and linguistically appropriate services (clas) to patients with 
limited english proficiency (lep). as the us pursues high-value, high-performance healthcare, our ability 
to meet the needs of our most vulnerable will determine whether we succeed...

One of the challenges confronting the U.S. health care system is delivering high-value, effective therapies and clinical services that provide the best health outcomes. The 2016 Medicare Board of Trustees report projects the Medicare trust fund will become insolvent by 2028.1 The U.S. ranks last amongst industrialized countries in cost, quality and health equity.2 The Affordable Care Act (ACA),...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) establishes a new category of health care provider—the accountable care organization (ACO)—within the Medicare program, with rules for provider participation and principles for sharing in the savings generated by this form of coordinated health care delivery. In this second blog post in a series on health care financing, we address th...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was designed to increase health insurance coverage while limiting the disruption to individuals with existing sources of insurance coverage, particularly those with employer-sponsored insurance (ESI). To limit disruption to those with coverage, the ACA implements the employer mandate, which requires firms with more than 50 employees to offer health insurance or fac...

Quality of Care as a Driver of Hospital Consolidation: A Look at Indiana Hospitals Over the past 20 years, the U.S. healthcare system has experienced a rapid increase in hospital consolidation in the form of systems and networks [1]. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) offers hospitals a new incentive to join a system or network. ACA links hospital reimbursement to quality of care provided, making sy...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has provided the Medicare program with an array of tools to improve the quality of care that beneficiaries receive and to increase the efficiency with which that care is provided. Notably, the ACA has created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which is developing and testing promising new models to improve the quality of care provided to Medicare bene...

A central component of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the creation of state-based health insurance exchanges, which have the potential to substantially improve the functioning and expand the reach of the private health insurance market. Here, we describe salient features of the current market for health insurance and explain how the exchanges will build on this system by altering incentives f...

The authors conducted in-depth qualitative research to examine questions around provider networks in employer health plans, particularly the development of so-called “narrow networks,” which have grown in the individual market exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA). These narrow networks are characterized by offering considerably fewer health providers than...

In 2006, the Synthesis Project published a research synthesis on the impact of hospital mergers on prices, costs and quality of care (38). Since that time, the literature has expanded a great deal. We review those subsequent findings in this Synthesis Update. In particular, we focus on the impact of hospital mergers on prices and quality, and introduce a review of the evidence on physician-hosp...