Collaboration seeks to uncover the best strategies to improve health care, lower costs

A group of health care organizations are joining forces to compile evidence on the strategies the work best to address a variety of common, and usually expensive, medical conditions. Meanwhile, the nation's new Medicare chief is hitting the road to hear ideas about improving the health care system.

The Wall Street Journal Health Blog: A Health-Care Dream Team On A Hunt For The Best Treatments
Here's a premise we'll bet you've heard before: If only the rest of the country could deliver the kind of high-quality, low-cost medical care that such organizations as the Mayo Clinic and Intermountain Healthcare provide, America's health-care problems would be solved (Winslow, 12/15).

The Associated Press/Boston Globe: Project Seeks To Lower Health Costs, Improve Care
Six health care systems across the country, including a health institute at New Hampshire's Dartmouth College, are collaborating on a project aimed at improving health care quality while reducing costs (12/15).

San Francisco Chronicle: Donald Berwick Wants To Hear Ideas For Health Care
Medicare's new boss, Dr. Donald Berwick, likes to tell the story of a patient he had years ago when he worked as a pediatrician at Children's Hospital in Boston. The patient, a 15-year-old boy named Kevin, had been in and out of the hospital dozens of times for a condition known as short bowel syndrome. Berwick asked him what the staff could to do to improve his care and, after some prodding, the boy wrote down three things: create a plan for his care, communicate better with each other and ask him what he thought (Colliver, 12/16).

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This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.