Technology

This sweeping proposal is the biggest step yet in shifting reimbursement from a volume-based to a value-based system. Stakeholders offered mixed opinions this week.

Patients whose hospital care providers used mobile secure text messaging to communicate had shorter hospital stays compared with patients whose health providers used standard paging systems to communicate.

Two posters presented at the AMCP Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy Annual Meeting evaluated opioid misuse and healthcare utilization and cost, as well as a program to flag potential misuse early.

Scottsdale Health Partners’ success is derived from its physician engagement, care coordination and transformation, and meaningful IT usage, explained James Whitfill, MD, chief medical officer. The organization has also learned that direct contact with both patients and provider is critical to continuing that success.

While healthcare for retirees once meant repeated trips to the doctor’s office, many are now able to receive high-quality medical services without leaving the comfort of home. And it’s all because of telemedicine.

Cost, biosimilars, and technology dominated the conversations when managed care pharmacists, health plan administrators, physicians, and more gathered for the AMCP Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy Annual Meeting in San Francisco, April 19-22, 2016.

Flatiron Health has announced the development of a cloud-based electronic health record and an analytics tool to support reporting requirements for those clinics that will be selected to participate in the Oncology Care Model.

The current reactive healthcare system is driving digital health innovations, Yoona Kim, PharmD, PhD, head of clinical modeling and analytics with Proteus Digital Health, said at the AMCP Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy Annual Meeting 2016.

With patients increasingly demanding more of anyone involved in their healthcare, technology is playing an important role, explained panelists at a session of Specialty Pharmacy Connect, a pre-meeting program held ahead of the AMCP Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy Annual Meeting 2016.

Cancer pathways can potentially improve patient outcomes and reduce costs. Recent concerns about pathway adoption deserve attention, including excessive administrative burden to clinics.

Diabetes care is incredibly complex and people are still trying to use data to predict issues with glycemic control, determine what the best combinations of drugs are, and to improve adherence with patients, explained Lonny Reisman, MD, CEO of HealthReveal and keynote speaker at Patient-Centered Diabetes Care.

There may be some reluctance to reimburse telemedicine because there is a feeling that telemedicine costs might be added to overall cost, rather than be substituted, David Brumley, MD, MBA, senior medical director at Tufts Health Plan, explained at the 4th Annual Patient-Centered Diabetes Care Meeting, held April 7-8 in Teaneck, NJ.

Scottsdale Health Partners has improved coordinated care on both a physical and a virtual level through the creation of a secure texting connection for real-time collaboration, James Whitfill, MD, chief medical officer of Scottsdale Health Partners, explained at the National Association of Accountable Care Organizations’ Spring 2016 Conference.

This week is the 4th annual Patient-Centered Diabetes Care (PCDC), co-hosted by The American Journal of Managed Care and Joslin Diabetes Center. Here we highlight the top 5 things to look forward to at this year’s meeting.

How new technologies like mHealth and wearables may affect insurance providers and patient costs, according to Joseph C. Kvedar, MD, vice president of Connected Health at Partners HealthCare.

Getting patients access to their own data is a good thing that will increase engagement, but it is important that improving access to data will create cohesive care for the patient and not lead to fragmentation, said Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, assistant professor at the School of Information and the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan.

New data-based tools need to be developed with the end user in mind in order to be made more effective, Eric Schneider, MD, MSc, senior vice president for policy and research at The Commonwealth Fund, said at the AcademyHealth National Health Policy Conference.

Sync for Science-a collaboration between the National Institutes of Health, Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, and Harvard Medical School-will allow patients to access their own health data, which they can then share with researchers involved in the initiative.