Value-Based Care

Being admitted to the hospital on the weekend is associated with an increased likelihood of a hospital-acquired condition, which in turn increases cost and length of stay, reported researchers from the University of Southern California.

There are concerns that retail clinics provide inferior quality of care. The authors found no difference in quality among retail clinics, physician offices, and emergency departments.

The authors report on a conceptual "specialty ACO" design in cardiology in which cardiology-specific historic spending targets are created to capture cardiovascular disease—related reimbursement and a quality measurement system is introduced.

Missouri already spends $1.2 billion on Medicaid managed care in less than half its counties. The new plan would extend managed care to all Medicaid clients except the blind, disabled, and elderly. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, the CEO of the Medical Society argued against moving Medicaid to managed care, citing problems in other states.

Accountable care organizations can leverage health information technology to improve patient safety without creating alert fatigue among providers, according to a study in the Journal of Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy.

While supporting the FDA's standards-based regulatory efforts to explore next generation sequencing tests as diagnostic tools, the American Society of Clinical Oncology warned against misinterpretation or over-interpretation of test results.

A one-minute look at managed care news during the week of March 23, 2015, including the 5-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act and another step toward value-based payments.

HHS Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell's announcement that CMS would move to value-based payments was a nail in the coffin for those skeptics who believed the push for value contracting would pass, according to Joseph Gifford, MD, chief executive of the Providence-Swedish Health Alliance.

When Aledade launched in 2014, founder Farzad Mostashari, MD, former national coordinator for health information technology (IT), was spending about half the time talking to doctors not about his new company, but about value-based payments and what accountable care organizations were.