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Accountable Care Organizations: A Health Experiment in Progress
ACOs are groups of providers that have been assigned a projected budget per patient. If the cost of caring for the patient comes in below that level, the group shares the savings. The idea is that doctors will better coordinate care to prevent wasteful or ineffective treatment. Pilot programs suggest the jury is still out on ACOs' ability to drive this kind of behavior.
A patient goes to the doctor's office with vague back pain. He gets the most expensive scan on the market, which suggests surgery might be needed. Better be safe than sorry; he has the surgery. But a closer look would have revealed that cheaper physical therapy would have been just as effective.
The dollars wasted on that patient contribute to a key problem with the health care system: soaring costs that haven't been accompanied by a commensurate increase in quality. Obamacare is trying to fix the problem of expensive, unnecessary care in several ways, the most well-known of which are accountable care organizations.
ACOs are groups of providers that have been assigned a projected budget per patient. If the cost of caring for the patient comes in below that level, the group shares the savings. The idea is that doctors will better coordinate care to prevent wasteful or ineffective treatment. Pilot programs suggest the jury is still out on ACOs' ability to drive this kind of behavior.
Read the full story here: http://bit.ly/1bgjepw
Source: National Journal
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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Oncology Onward: A Conversation With Thyme Care CEO and Cofounder Robin Shah
October 2nd 2023Robin Shah, CEO of Thyme Care, which he founded in 2020 with Bobby Green, MD, president and chief medical officer, joins hosts Emeline Aviki, MD, MBA, and Stephen Schleicher, MD, MBA, to discuss his evolution as an entrepreneur in oncology care innovation and his goal of positively changing how patients experience the cancer system.
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Covered Preventive Services at Risk: V-BID Summit Breaks Down the Braidwood v Becerra Case
March 20th 2024For more than a decade, certain high-value preventive care services have been covered at no cost to patients under the Affordable Care Act, but a current legal challenge has the coverage at risk.
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Reducing Low-Value Care Is Hard, but What About Just Not Paying for It?
March 14th 2024After years of efforts to reduce low-value care, panelists at the 2024 Value-Based Insurance Design Summit proposed a new strategy: drawing a line in the sand that payers will not be on the hook for these services.
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