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Population Health

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Through the partnership, Humana and Heal will expand the startup’s current markets to include Chicago, Charlotte, Houston and others that are part of Bold Goal, a multi-year effort to improve overall health of communities by addressing both medical needs and working with partners to address social determinants of health, such as food insecurity.

On this episode of Managed Care Cast, we speak with the senior vice president of Network Payment Innovation and Contract Management for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, which is launching a new value-based payment approach for independent primary care practices. The pilot project will reward practices for keeping patients healthy while providing extra support during the pandemic.

On today’s episode of Managed Care Cast, we feature a short excerpt of an upcoming interview in the August issue of The American Journal of Managed Care® with Mandy K. Cohen, MD, MPH, North Carolina's secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, as part of our yearlong Q&A series. We discussed the state's upcoming transition to Medicaid managed care, the pandemic, her advice to public health workers in the face of criticism, and how what is learned from the pandemic can help inform the future of managed care going forward.

The talk by Ned Sharpless, MD, director of the National Cancer Institute, preceded presentations on some of the earliest findings about the effects of COVID-19 on cancer: It appears that patients treated with chemotherapy for lung or thoracic cancer shortly before being diagnosed with COVID-19 face a higher risk of death, and so do patients with cancer who take the combination of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and azithromycin.

Following an announcement that hospitals are to bypass the CDC and send all coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)–related information to a central database, questions have been raised as to the future of COVID-19 data transparency and politicization.

Between 2002 and 2015, data showed an increase in the percentage of intimate partner violence (IPV)–related emergency department claims paid by private insurance in the United States. This finding suggests the Affordable Care Act (ACA) may have increased women’s willingness and ability to seek medical attention for IPV-related injuries and disclose IPV as the source of the injuries, according to a study published in Women’s Health Issues.

The Affordable Care Act encourages preventive care, like cancer screenings, by eliminating copays, so that additional years will only see the number of lives saved grow, noted Fumiko Chino, MD, assistant attending radiation oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, in an interview prior to ASCO20 Virtual, this year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Research has established an association between social risk factors and child health outcomes, while professional medical organizations have endorsed screening for such factors in clinical settings. Providing an in-person patient navigator to address family social needs leads to a decrease in child health care utilization, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open.

There will never be all mandatory payment models or all value-based models, but we can craft a value-based model around just about anything as long as everybody agrees on what the criteria is, said Lili Brillstein, CEO of Brillstein Collaborative Consulting, and former Director for Episodes of Care at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.