CMS Hospital Value-Based Programs: Refinements Are Needed To Reduce Health Disparities And Improve Outcomes.

Several Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) programs aim to transform how health care is delivered by adjusting Medicare inpatient hospital payments through a system of rewards and penalties based on performance on measures of quality. These programs are the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program, and the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program. We analyzed value-based program penalty results for various groups of hospitals across these three programs and assessed the impact of patient and community health equity risk factors on hospital penalties.

Information properties of naturally-occurring proteins: Fourier analysis and complexity phase plots.

In previous work from this lab, the information in natural proteins was investigated with Ribonuclease A (RNase A) serving as the source. The signature traits were investigated at three structure levels: primary through tertiary. The present paper travels further by charting the primary structure information of about half a million molecules.