Because physicians and health plan members both value choice, the current weak market for Inflectra and Renflexis could be a passing phase. Attitudes could change once there is more data that show people do well after switching from Remicade to the newcomers.
Once they have the right platforms in place, insurers can layer on predictive analytics, digital medical records, and other innovations that promise to make health care costs more manageable—and in the process make health insurers more competitive with the likes of CVS and maybe, eventually, Amazon.
Some say gene editing platforms like CRISPR are a truer version of gene therapy because they are designed to home in on a particular genomic location.
A MedPage Today blog post suggests that they do. Industry veterans say they’re unaware of bonuses for denials but agree prior auth processes should be more transparent.
The 40-year-old has to guide one of the health insurer’s regional markets as the ACA continues to evolve. His course? Keep strengthening ties with providers.
Building on a similar effort in California, Catalyst for Payment Reform is proposing a standardized set of 50 ACO measures. Some of the country’s largest purchasers are taking it to their health plans.
In theory, this approach could help untangle some knotty cost and quality concerns about medications as they move from clinical trials and into clinical use. But there’s that credibility issue.
A look at three different approaches that seek to address social needs in a strategic and somewhat comprehensive way. At this point, all of them are experiments, and no one knows which will prove to be sustainable, replicable, or even beneficial to the patients and communities they seek to serve.
Providers and payers are being asked to tackle the ‘upstream’ causes of poor health. Medicaid managed care organizations are being asked to screen enrollees for social needs. Some targeted efforts have translated into cost savings and make sense in value-based arrangements. But are we asking the health sector to take on too much?
Ezekiel J. Emanuel’s Prescription for the Future is true to its title and proposes a five- to 10-year agenda for transforming expensive, wasteful American health care into a system that delivers high-value care. This is a qualitative book based on case studies that identify and systematize how to improve quality, patient experience, and cost.
That’s thanks to about 57 million unplanned sick days for workers. The prevalence of diabetes in the adult population grew from 10.6% in 2008 to 11.6% in 2016. It was at 11.5% for the first nine months of 2017.
The document “Feature and Function Recommendations To Optimize Clinician Usability of Direct Interoperability To Enhance Patient Care” offers recommendations from the clinician point of view. Widespread adoption of even a few of these recommendations by designers and vendors would greatly enhance care.
As expected, pharmacy costs increased with the introduction of this new treatment in a market dominated by over-the-counter and generic treatments. On the other hand, outpatient GI-related and irritable bowel disease health care resource use and costs substantially decreased among commercial and Medicare patients following linaclotide treatment initiation.
Training primary care physicians to identify and treat oral health problems will go a long way toward integrating care for those problems with general medical care, according to a study in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.
