ACOs need to provide comprehensive care management across a spectrum of provider specialties. To do this, they need a framework for evaluating potential partners that will help risk-bearing providers establish the partnerships that will enable them to achieve their goals.
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.
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.
Mistreated is a comprehensive and brilliant analysis of American health care by Robert Pearl, the CEO of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group. The book’s subtitle aptly summarizes the author’s point of view: “Why We think We’re Getting Good Treatment–and Why We’re Usually Wrong.”
Morality rates for inpatient hospitalizations for opioid abuse quadrupled between 2000 and 2014, according to a study in Health Affairs. The mortality rates increased from 0.43% before 2000 to 2.02% in 2014. In 2016, 15,000 Americans died from heroin overdoses and 20,000 others died from overdoses from synthetic opioids.
