About Chris Moriates

Christopher Moriates, MD is a hospitalist, the assistant Dean for Healthcare Value and an Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at Dell Medical School at University of Texas, Austin. He is also Director of Implementation Initiatives at Costs of Care. He co-authored the book Understanding Value-Based Healthcare (McGraw-Hill, 2015), which Atul Gawande has called “a masterful primer for all clinicians,” and Bob Wachter said is “essential reading for everyone who care about making our system better.”
Why all our current efforts to cut waste won’t save money after all
February 11, 2020 |  1
I am feeling discouraged. Actually, I am pretty frustrated. I truly believed that if we could “choose wisely” and cut out the nearly $1 trillion of waste in health care that we would make a real dent in costs in health care. Not only that, I even thought that decreasing these total costs of care […]
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The Top 10 Articles Hospitalists Should Know about from Last Year
November 8, 2019 |  0
Do you have a stack of journals piling up on your desk, beside your bed or in your email inbox? In 1950, medical knowledge was estimated to double every 50 years, but now the doubling time is every few months. At this rate, it is impossible to keep up with the literature, but a group […]
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Have Lower Readmission Rates Led to Higher Mortality for Patients with COPD?
September 18, 2019 |  2
There is at least one aspect of “Obamacare” that my mother-in-law and I can firmly agree on: hospitals should not get paid for frequent readmissions. The Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP), enacted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2012 with the goal of penalizing hospitals for excessive readmissions, has great face […]
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Hospitalist rebels: Breaking the rules for our patients and ourselves.
August 7, 2019 |  5
In 2017, Dr. Don Berwick wrote about “breaking the rules for better care.” He was discussing a more systematic way for organizations to ask clinicians, staff, and patients about the “habits and rules [that] appear to be harming care without commensurate benefits and, with prudence and circumspection, to change them.” As I spent long hours […]
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Quick Review – Three Things I Just Learned About Sepsis
May 28, 2019 |  0
This past year, I reviewed a lot of journal articles to prepare for the Updates in Hospital Medicine talk with Dr. Carrie Herzke at Hospital Medicine 2019. But for the last six weeks or so, I simply monitored the headlines to ensure there wasn’t a blockbuster finding that we would have to integrate last minute […]
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Against AMA Discharges: In Defense of Difficult Patients
February 11, 2019 |  7
“Why are you yelling? Get the f* out of my face!” I was relieved. I was worried about her, having been brought in by ambulance seizing. My resident said she was not waking up for him, which we hoped was just post-ictal, but we were not sure yet. “Oh good! You are gonna be just […]
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