Miscellany

• A coalition of large employers and health insurers called the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform has been formed in order to encourage Congress and state legislatures to use market based reforms to improve quality and to reduce the number of uninsured.
  
• The medical community has begun to mobilize against the nurse practitioner staffed clinics being established on growing scales in workplaces, discount stores, and pharmacies.
  
• GAO issued a report today encouraging the Department of Health and Human Services to make better use of information technology to reduce the increasing quality data collection burden that the Medicare program imposes on hospitals. The Medicare program, which HHS just recently enhanced, collects data on all admissions, not just Medicare admissions, and had lead to the creation of robust online hospital quality comparison tools such as HHS's Hospital Compare tool. "GAO recommends that the Secretary of HHS identify the specific steps the department plans to take to promote the use of health IT for the collection and submission of data for CMS’s hospital quality measures and inform interested parties about those steps, the expected time frame, and associated milestones." HHS agrees with the recommendation according to the report.