The Massachusetts Health Care Reform Law is a groundbreaking effort to bring stability to the Commonwealth's health care system. A booklet discussing the implementation of this initiative was just published by the Massachusetts Hospital Association. A PDF copy is attached.

The UMass Memorial Managed Care Network, our 900+ doctors at UMass Memorial and in the community, received the Harvard Pilgrim Honor Role Quality award for the fourth time in the last five years. This award is for recognition of top 10 percent performance among all Harvard Pilgrim Health Care doctors in quality measures for their HMO. HPHC has been ranked number one in the nation among HMOs for its performance in quality. Congrats to our docs!

Our UMass Memorial Managed Care Network is comprised of some of the top performing physicians in the state for delivering high-quality and cost efficient care to their patients. This has once again been confirmed by both Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Tufts Health Plan - plans that recently issued awards to physicians for certain measures of quality and relative resource utilization.

The Institute of Medicine report on preventing medication errors (released on July 20, 2006) identifies that in hospitals, errors are common during every step of the medication process, and that they