This is cool:

WASHINGTON — President Obama intends to nominate Massachusetts pediatrician Donald Berwick, known for his work to improve patient care, to oversee Medicare and Medicaid. … Berwick is also president and chief executive of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a nonprofit organization in Cambridge.

IHI does really interesting work on assessing care quality using a variety of measures and stats. They've been theorizing about how to help hospitals deliver better care at lower cost; presumably now Berwick will get to put those ideas to the test, on a massive scale.

This could be a big deal in ensuring the effectiveness and long-term solvency of Medicare and Medicaid, and therefore the entire federal budget.

Apropos of Massachusetts, here's some interesting and very succinct testimony from IHI's Don Goldmann on how we could start to contain health care costs.