Former acting Medicare chief Donald Berwick, MD, has announced that he is running for governor of Massachusetts.

“I feel proud of and grateful to this state, and I want to find the best way to give back,” Berwick said in an announcement posted Monday on his campaign website.

For the past several years, the agency that oversees the nation’s residency programs—the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education—has been mired in discussions dealing with resident work hours. The ACGME’s Next Accreditation System, its new structure for evaluating physician training programs, is sure to shift talk to another topic.

“We did want to change the conversation,” said Timothy Brigham, ACGME’s chief of staff and senior vice president of its department of education. “The conversation should never have really been about duty hours.”

Not a day goes by, it seems, the New York Times or some other equally prominent journalistic source publishes a scathing invective regarding the irresponsible cost of healthcare in the U.S.  In this context, it is equal parts highly entertaining and appalling to measure how ignorant Emergency Physicians are regarding the cost of the care they provide.

Measures taken to ease the pressure on overcrowded hospital emergency departments have been based on flawed data which wrongly blames general practice patients for clogging the system, according to a study by emergency specialists from The University of Western Australia.

A “hot bed” system has been permanently established in the Palmerston North Hospital emergency department after a trial to reduce waiting times proved successful.

It aims to improve the flow of critically ill patients through the emergency department who need to see specialists or emergency doctors.

A “hot bed” system has been permanently established in the Palmerston North Hospital emergency department after a trial to reduce waiting times proved successful.

It aims to improve the flow of critically ill patients through the emergency department who need to see specialists or emergency doctors.

An FDNY EMT dispatcher stayed on the phone with a stroke victim for eight hours as rescuers tried to pinpoint where the distressed and slurring woman had fallen.

EMT Joann Hilman-Payne got the call at about 1 PM on Monday afternoon, and stayed on the line with the stroke victim, Mary Thomas, as rescue workers went to the locaton they believed Thomas was at, based on a cell phone tower that received her call. But she wasn’t there.

Even though it’s costly care, ER services are not the cost villains that politicians and others have portrayed them to be. Kellermann told me that ERs account for between 3 and 6 percent of total health care spending compared to 31 percent for inpatient hospital stays. “The average cost of an ER visit is $900. It’s 10 times that for the average hospital stay,” he pointed out.

“If residency programs do not ramp up the training of these physicians the shortage in primary care, especially in remote areas, will get worse,” Chen said in a statement. “The study’s findings raise questions about whether federally funded graduate medical education institutions are meeting the nation’s need for more primary care physicians.”

Central to the patient safety movement are 2 related ideas. First, information about past errors helps to drive down the incidence of future ones. Second, to collect such data, provider cooperation is key.

Through the years, though, some patient safety advocates have worried that the current liability system may be undermining provider openness and transparency. After all, why identify, report, and discuss a medical error when the threat of a lawsuit looms so large? Now a study recently outlined in the New York Times takes a contrarian view.