This one is for you nursing nerds

I heard a news blurb on NPR the other day about a study done at Dartmouth regarding the cost of medicare, and the management of chronically ill patients. To sum it up it talked about how medicare costs are driven up by futile, unneccessary, unwanted care given to people with terminal illnesses. The reason I was interested, though, is because they talked about how IHC is the model for low cost, high quality medical care as far as medicare is concerned. Compared to a few other regions, if the entire US would follow their system of managing chronically ill people, it would reduce the $123 billion dollar medicare debt by $40 billion. I felt proud that at BYU we did most of our training with IHC hospitals! But heck, maybe it just means they pay nurses crap there (which we know they do), and that's how they keep costs down. Anyway- just thought it might interest some of you to read the study.