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Medicare Advantage enrollment and spending are expected to surge over the next decade, until more than 4 in 10 beneficiaries are in the program by 2028. Read More →
It’s no secret that physicians are bogged down by EHRs. Now, the federal government says it has some solutions. A new draft strategy issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Wednesday details three overarching goals to reduce clinician burden revolving around entering information into the EHRs, meeting regulatory requirements and improving EHR ease of use. In several recommendations, the agency vowed to continue is work stripping down regulations and working with the industry to find solutions to growing problems. Read More →
We are excited to announce Amazon Comprehend Medical, a new HIPAA-eligible machine learning service that allows developers to process unstructured medical text and identify information such as patient diagnosis, treatments, dosages, symptoms and signs, and more. Comprehend Medical helps health care providers, insurers, researchers, and clinical trial investigators as well as health care IT, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies to improve clinical decision support, streamline revenue cycle and clinical trials management, and better address data privacy and protected health information (PHI) requirements. Read More →
The insurer is teaming up with the physician-led value-based care organization to serve Medicare Advantage patients in southern and central California. Read More →
When they're sick, Americans seem to know what they want: antibiotics. And if they don't get them, their doctors' reputations may suffer. Read More →
Budget hawks worry that rather than replace comparatively expensive in-person visits, extra telemedicine billings would add to them. Read More →
Cutting out the middlemen, Walmart, General Motors and other companies are experimenting with new models for health coverage. Read More →
Survey finds overemphasis on physical health and treatment compared to underlying components of health such as diet and environmental factors. Read More →
Nearly 12% of Takotsubo Syndrome patients are readmitted to a hospital within 30 days of an inpatient stay, recent research shows. Read More →
Bellin Health shares how the health system achieved the top composite quality score in the first performance year of Next Generation ACO. Read More →
New research shows a significant increase in emergency department violence, but there are strategies to address the problem. Read More →
By focusing on public health instead of incarceration, the country has stopped an opioid epidemic. Psychologists are playing a key role in this dramatic turnaround. Read More →
The key to helping hospital physicians and quality leaders build an effective clinical analytics program and leverage performance improvement. Read More →
The U.S. Senate passed its amendment to H.R. 6, the Opioid Crisis Response Act of 2018, on Monday in a 99-1 vote to address the United States’ ongoing opioid addiction epidemic. The bipartisan bill package contains proposals from 72 senators and work from five Senate committees: banking, commerce, finance, health, and judiciary. Read More →
For Kristin Cox, MD, an internist and a program director at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts, the real value comes from the fresh eyes.
“Residents are in a perfect position to evaluate the systems we’re using,” she says. “They see best practices, what works, and what doesn’t work. They see every department on days, nights, and weekends. They see every aspect of the hospital.”
And seeing those things can lead to improvements — improvements in systems within the hospital, improvements within care teams, and, most importantly, improvements for patients. Those improvements are central to a unique QI-themed training program for residents at Newton-Wellesley. Read More →
A healthcare collaborative in San Diego achieved a 22% reduction in heart attack hospitalization rates compared to an 8% reduction in the rest of California, research published this week says.
The collaborative—Be There San Diego—launched in 2011. The 22% reduction in heart attack hospitalization rates was attained from 2011 to 2014, avoiding about 3,800 hospitalizations and attaining an estimated $86 million in savings. Read More →
Seventeen health systems in 21 states are collaborating to identify, develop, and scale financially sustainable digital solutions to improve healthcare for the 75 million Americans on Medicaid.
The Medicaid Transformation Project will focus on critical challenges facing vulnerable populations across the country, including behavioral health, women and infant care, substance use disorder, and avoidable emergency department visits. Read More →
A Google study released this month finds that customer experience is the primary reason consumers choose to travel with a particular brand. Easy-to-use websites and online reviews are second and third.
What does this have to do with healthcare? Quite a bit, according to experts in customer experience, a field that is becoming increasingly important to health systems. Thanks to new ways to gather and organize data, health systems now have actionable information to improve patient experience, often in real time. These processes are enhanced by technology that uses natural language processing to detect patterns in that data. Read More →
The focus on behavioral health is surfacing in pediatric facility design. As this traditionally underserved area of healthcare grows, providers are boosting their mental health services by hiring more specialists, building more private rooms, integrating more play areas, and weaving more soothing, nature-related elements into the design. Read More →
Addressing the problem of professional burnout has become a pressing topic in psychiatry as we all try to achieve a work-life balance that is satisfying, enriching, and sustainable. This month’s author, John Kern, M.D., found that working as the consulting psychiatrist for a collaborative care program helped stave off burnout and allowed him to reach his clinical and personal goals. Read More →
A significant number of Medicaid beneficiaries — one in five — have a behavioral health diagnosis (mental health and/or substance use disorder). However, many of these individuals are served in fragmented systems of care with little to no coordination across providers, often resulting in poor health care quality and high costs. Read More →
The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) is proud to announce NCQA’s eMeasure testing laboratory is now approved by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). As an ONC-Authorized Testing Lab (ONC-ATL), NCQA can perform health IT tests as part of the ONC Health IT Certification program.
NCQA is the only approved alternative to this government-based electronic quality measure testing procedure. With this approval, health IT and data vendors can use the NCQA generated test decks for two certifications; ONC HIT Certification for use in reporting electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) to CMS for the Quality Payment Program; as well as NCQA eMeasure certification for use in NCQA’s recognition for Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) and as a standard supplemental dataset in support of HEDIS reporting. Read More →
Collaborating with public health and community organizations to foster informed decision-making can help Medicaid entities better address the social determinants of health (SDOHs), says new guidance issued by the National Quality Forum (NQF).
An expert panel assembled by NQF found that Medicaid programs are well positioned to positively impact food insecurity and housing-related SDOH among their beneficiary populations, but only if they work closely with other organizations in their communities. Read More →
Cost measures are a growing part of Medicare’s value-based payment programs. Medicare Spending per Beneficiary (MSPB) is the cost measure included in Medicare’s Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program. Beneficiaries who are dually enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid are known to have higher spending on care, but it is unknown whether spending on the MSPB measure varies based on dual enrollment and whether this has implications for the performance of safety-net hospitals. Read More →
Medication synchronization programs based in pharmacies simplify the refill process by enabling patients to pick up all of their medications on a single visit. This can be especially important for improving medication adherence in patients with complex chronic diseases. Read More →
On January 11, 2018 the Trump Administration released a long-anticipated solicitation to states in the form of a State Medicaid Directors Letter. The letter invites proposals to undertake demonstrations to test the effects of threatening to withdraw or reduce Medicaid – or actually doing so -- from people who fail to meet work requirements. Eleven states currently have applications in the pipeline, and in recent days two more states appear to have at least preliminarily raised their hands as well. Read More →
Sudden Unexplained Infant Death, or ‘SIDS’ is the leading cause of death of babies under the age of one in the United States. Current recommendations call for infants to be placed to sleep on their back at all times to lessen the risk of SIDS. However, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), many babies are still placed in unsafe sleep environments. Read More →
The stories of these three children share one similarity: The U.S. health-care system has failed them in spectacular fashion even as it has put their parents under severe emotional and financial strain. All for the lack of home-care nurses. Read More →
This article evaluates the differences in the quality of skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) that Medicare Advantage and FFS beneficiaries entered in the period 2012–14. After we controlled for patients’ clinical, demographic, and residential neighborhood effects, we found that FFS Medicare patients have substantially higher probabilities of entering higher-quality SNFs (those rated four or five stars by Nursing Home Compare) and those with lower readmission rates, compared to MA enrollees. The difference between MA and FFS Medicare SNF selections was less for enrollees in higher-quality MA plans than those in lower-quality plans, but Medicare Advantage still guided patients to lower-quality facilities. Read More →