Jordan Rau

Medicare's "overall hospital quality" rating aims to help consumers by boiling down a variety of measurements into a number star. But Congress asked the administration to hold off on the change.

Patients looking for home health care services will be impressed if they check out the federal government's ratings of Brookdale Senior Living. Four of the company's home health agencies — in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island — each earned five stars, the top quality score, primarily based on ...

Researchers tested whether loosening restrictions on the work schedules of doctors in training would lead to more harm to patients.

The federal government is penalizing 758 hospitals with higher rates of patient safety incidents, and more than half of those places had also been fined last year, Medicare records released late Wednesday show.

Among the hospitals getting punished for the first time are some well-known institutions, including Stanford Health ...

The rate of avoidable complications affecting patients in hospitals leveled off in 2014, after three years of declines, according to a federal report released Tuesday.

Hospitals have averted many types of injuries where clear preventive steps have been identified, but they still struggle to avert complications with broader causes ...

Consumers seeking health policies with the most freedom in choosing doctors and hospitals are finding far fewer of those plans on the insurance marketplaces. And the premiums are rising faster than for other types of coverage.

The plans, usually known as preferred provider organizations or PPOs, pay for a portion ...

A high-profile Medicare project pushing doctors and hospitals to join together to operate more efficiently has yet to save the government money. Nearly half of the groups' care was more costly than the government estimated it would be based on historical data, federal records show.

The Centers for Medicare & ...

The federal government released on Thursday a new five-star rating system for home health agencies, an effort to bring clarity to a fast-growing but fragmented corner of the medical industry where it's often difficult to distinguish good from bad.

Medicare applied the new quality measure to more than 9,000 agencies ...

A hospital closure can send tremors through a city or town, leaving residents fearful about how they will be cared for in emergencies and serious illnesses.

A study released Monday offers some comfort, finding that when hospitals shut down, death rates and other markers of quality generally don't worsen.

Researchers ...

Brand-name drugs to treat heartburn, diabetes, depression and other common afflictions of the elderly were among the most expensive drains on the federal government's Medicare prescription benefit, costing more than $1 billion each in 2013, newly released data show.

The federal government popped the cap off drug spending on Thursday, ...

Vacuum cleaners get them. Movies get them. Now hospitals are being given star ratings to help patients decide which ones to use.

On Thursday the federal government awarded its first star ratings to hospitals based on the opinions of patients. Some of the nation's most lofty hospitals—the ones featured in ...

The federal government now factors patient satisfaction ratings into the rates Medicare pays hospitals. Some hospitals with lower ratings are finding it's difficult to change patients' perceptions.

The sleek hospital tower that Johns Hopkins Medicine built in 2012 has the frills of a luxury hotel, including a meditation garden, 500 works of art, free wi-fi and a library of books, games and audio.

As Dr. Zishan Siddiqui watched patients and some fellow physicians in Baltimore move ...

The bacterial outbreak at UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center highlights shortcomings in the federal government's efforts to avert the most lethal hospital infections, which are becoming increasingly impervious to treatment.

Government efforts are hobbled, infection control experts say, by gaps in monitoring the prevalence of these resilient germs both within ...

The Obama administration said Monday that it wants to speed up changes to Medicare so that within four years half of its traditional spending will go to doctors, hospitals and other providers that coordinate patient care.

The shift is being made to stress quality and frugality over payment by the ...

What Medicare gives with one hand, it's taking away with another. Most government quality bonuses to hospitals this year are being wiped out by penalties issued for other shortcomings.

The government is taking performance into account when paying hospitals, one of the biggest changes in Medicare's 50-year-history and one that's ...

In health insurance prices, as in the weather, Alaska and the Sun Belt are extremes. This year Alaska is the most expensive health insurance market for people who do not get coverage through their employers, while Phoenix, Albuquerque, N.M., and Tucson, Ariz., are among the very cheapest.

In this second ...

If your cardiologist is away at a conference when you're having a stabbing feeling in your chest, don't fret. You may be more likely to live.

A study published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine found frail patients admitted to teaching hospitals with two common types of heart ...

Medicare has begun punishing 721 hospitals with high rates of infections and other medical errors, cutting payments to half of the nation's major teaching hospitals and many institutions that are marquee names.

Intermountain Medical Center in Utah, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger Medical ...

About 75,000 patients a year die from infections they caught in the hospital. A Kaiser Health News analysis finds that nearly 700 hospitals across the nation have higher than expected infection rates.