Health Care Cost

This week, the top stories in managed care included HHS releasing the final rule for the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, a commentary on the downside of drug coupons, and the World Health Organization called on countries to enact a soda tax.

HHS has finalized the landmark Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), which reforms payment for Medicare providers and replaced the sustainable growth rate formula.

The partnership is expected to improve the quality of care and the overall care experience for Aetna members who seek care at Regional Cancer Care Associates (RCCA) clinics in New Jersey and Maryland.

Payment reform in the United States is moving quickly, but there are still a lot of unknowns among providers. Meetings like the ACO & Emerging Healthcare Delivery Coalition help accountable care organizations (ACOs) and providers share best practices and figure out how to succeed, said Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy and keynote speaker at the ACO Coalition's fall meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 20-21. Learn more about the meeting and register.

Although hospitals in Medicare’s Value-Based Purchasing program already receive patient experience points based on achievement, improvement, and consistency, placing more emphasis on improvement points could benefit hospitals serving minority patients

With 6 years under his belt, Patrick Conway, MD, is the longest serving chief medical officer in CMS history. During those 6 years, he has seen alignment with private payers increasing, Conway said during a plenary session at the fall meeting of the National Association of Accountable Care Organizations.

While working for Horizon Healthcare Innovations, Linda Schwimmer, JD, president and CEO of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute, gained insights on how best to transition to a pay-for-outcomes system and was able to actively work with healthcare stakeholders who were engaging in these models.

During the fall meeting of the National Association of Accountable Care Organizations (NAACOS) in Washington, DC, speakers from the government and from various ACOs across the country shared their insights into the success and opportunities of these delivery models. Here are 5 takeaways from the NAACOS fall conference.

According to a new proposal by the Center for American Progress, Medicare and private health insurance companies should have the power to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers, empowered by comparative effectiveness research data.

An effort by the University of Utah health system created an "opportunity index" to identify areas of cost variability that would show physicians where they could find savings and improve quality.

In this podcast Margaret E. O'Kane discusses how she got into quality measurement, the beginning of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and the next frontier in quality measurement.

This week in managed care, the top stories included new reports on a 10-year experiment in payment reform, more results from the early years of the Affordable Care Act, and findings on employee wellness programs.

In a series of video interviews, Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP, president emeritus and senior fellow of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, discussed the lessons learned from the Aligning Forces for Quality initiative.

A majority of hospitals that may be required to participate in the new Medicare cardiac bundled payment models would not experience losses or gains over $500,000 per year, according to a recent analysis by Avalere Health.

Highlights from the recent gathering of the American Association of Diabetes Educators, which met August 12-15, 2016, in San Diego, California.

Precision oncology, or the clinically and financially efficient use of genomically matched treatments and clinical trials, is evolving as a potentially important starting point for cancer care within successful alternative payment models.

The authors apply HHS’s payment taxonomy framework to acute unscheduled care and describe how payment reform supports delivery innovation.

Helen Burstin, MD, MPH, FACP, chief scientific officer of The National Quality Forum, explained that the 2 gaps that exist in quality measurement currently include data infrastructure and patient engagement.

This week, the top stories in managed care included the release of Medicare's Star ratings for hospital quality, a new proposal from CMS to require bundled payments for cardiac care, and an FDA panel recommended approving a continuous glucose monitoring system for dosing insulin.

To help clinics meet the objectives and reporting requirements of the Oncology Care Model (OCM), Flatiron Health has developed OncoEMR, a cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) coupled with an analytics tool.

Michael Kolodziej, MD, has joined Flatiron Health as national medical director, Managed Care Strategy.

Marcia Wilson, PhD, MBA, senior vice president of quality measurement at The National Quality Forum, explained that one’s opinion of quality measures comes from the type of work they are in — while a primary care physician may think there are too many, a health plan could believe there’s not enough. The challenge then, she added, is filling these gaps by creating and testing new, outcome-driven measures.

Specialty pharmacy may be one of the most rapidly rising costs in all of healthcare, but these costs are shouldered by a small percentage of patients. As such, it is essential that new innovative payment models be developed for these new products, said Steve Miller, MD, senior vice president and chief medical officer of Express Scripts.

An initiative that provided Pennsylvania Medicaid patients with a primary care “medical home” reduced the costs of their care by up to $4100 per year and decreased the number of their physician visits and hospitalizations.