This year, the most read articles from The American Journal of Accountable Care® explored how healthcare providers and payers have implemented innovative ideas to reduce spending while maintaining or increasing the quality of care.
The American Journal of Accountable Care® (AJAC®) publishes research and analysis that encourages the sharing of best practices to ensure the improvement of healthcare quality. This year, papers explored pathways toward success in accountable care organizations (ACOs), new interventions that reduced hospital readmissions or facilitated discharges, and much more.
These 5 articles exploring the meaning of quality and how to achieve it were the most read from AJAC® in 2016.
5. A Hospital Discharge Navigation Program: The Positive Impact of Facilitating the Discharge Navigation Process
A program that used navigators to help patients through a standardized discharge process resulted in those patients being discharged in less time and earlier in the day, according to researchers from Geisinger Medical Center. Their readmission rates were similar to those of patients without the discharge navigators.
4. Top 10 Ways to Improve Your Physician Quality Reporting System/Group Practice Reporting Option
Quality measures like the Physician Quality Reporting System and the Group Practice Reporting Option allow physician reimbursement to be tied to performance. Authors Amy Holm, MHA, and Hymin Zucker, MD, suggested 10 proactive ways practitioners can improve these metrics, which are essential for practices competing in the value-based healthcare landscape.
3. Health Plan—Provider Accountable Care Partnerships: How Have They Evolved?
A study combining qualitative interviews and surveys found that providers within private sector ACOs have demonstrated improvements in quality of care and a greater readiness to assume downside risk over time. However, further work must be done to include smaller practices in alternative payment and delivery models.
2. Cognitive Impairment and Reduced Early Readmissions in Congestive Heart Failure
In a study at Henry Ford Hospital, congestive heart failure patients who were identified as at risk for cognitive impairment and received a health psychology-based intervention while hospitalized had significantly lower readmission rates than their counterparts who received standard cardiology care only. The intervention included strategies to provide destigmatized education on cognitive impairment to patients and their families.
1. The Ingredients of Success in a Medicare Accountable Care Organization
The Hackensack Alliance ACO provides an excellent example of an organization that has cut costs while continuing to provide high quality care to the Medicare patients it serves. In this article, experts from within the ACO and outside of it identified the keys to this success, including the patient-centered medical home model and increased utilization of nurse care coordinators.
Homelessness Compounds Hospital Stay Challenges: Study Reveals Prolonged Discharge Struggles
March 28th 2024In this investigation, outcomes of interest were morbidity rate and length of hospital stay or a traumatic injury among a homeless population, and whether age and/or injury severity had an influence on that relationship—with implications for improving the discharge process for these patients.
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The Supreme Court seems likely to reject a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone; the FDA is inspecting far fewer pharmaceutical companies conducting clinical research; AstraZeneca has sued to block an Arkansas law that it said would unlawfully expand the 340B program to include for profit-pharmacy chains.
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Oncology Onward: A Conversation With Penn Medicine's Dr Justin Bekelman
December 19th 2023Justin Bekelman, MD, director of the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation, sat with our hosts Emeline Aviki, MD, MBA, and Stephen Schleicher, MD, MBA, for our final episode of 2023 to discuss the importance of collaboration between academic medicine and community oncology and testing innovative cancer care delivery in these settings.
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The White House has called out the Republican Study Committee’s budget proposal for backing legislation that would put restrictions on abortion access; nearly 108,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2022; surgeons in Boston have transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into an ailing 62-year-old man.
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