e-CareManagement blog

Chronic Disease Management • Technology • Strategy • Issues and Trends

Is Hospital-Physician Integration Sustainable?

Reprinted courtesy of MCOL. Perspectives on a Selected Key Topic |     April 2011/May 2011     |   Volume Three Issue Two Will a material number of hospitals and their core medical staffs, that are relatively independent, evolve into highly integrated delivery systems during this decade, and why? William J DeMarco MA, CMC President and CEO, Pendulum HealthCare [...]

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Could Facebook Be Your Platform for Care Coordination?

My guess is you’ve probably never asked yourself this question. A quick preview: Technical barriers aren’t the limiting factors to Facebook becoming a care coordination platform. Facebook’s company DNA won’t play well in health care. Could Facebook become the care coordination platform of the future? If not Facebook, then what? 1) Technical barriers aren’t the [...]

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The Achilles Heel of ACOs? Shared Savings Payment Model Unlikely to Motivate Hospitals

Sometimes you read something and the full impact doesn’t hit you until hours — perhaps days — later.  As I was out mountain biking today, the importance of something I ran across yesterday suddenly hit me. Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are today’s cure-du-jour for reforming the health care delivery system. Bob Berensen, MD of the Urban [...]

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Megatrend Spotting: Health Plan Role of Having “Best Data About YOUR Medical Conditions” is Up for Grabs

Who has the most comprehensive data about YOUR clinical conditions? For most people, the answer today is “your health plan”, but it’s not at all clear that health plans will continue to have this role in the future. As physicians and hospitals adopt EHRs, it’s foreseeable that clinical data about patients will be far more [...]

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The Big Idea in Understanding “Accountable Care Organizations”

Here’s the big idea: accountable care organizations (ACOs) are about creating accountability. ACOs of various types are being proposed in national health reform legislation. For all you ever wanted to know about ACOs, read How to Create Accountable Care Organizations from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.   I spent an hour and a half poring over the details of [...]

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Hospital Economics Don’t Reward Chronic Disease Management

My colleague and friend Dr. Jaan Sidorov has recently started a blog — Disease Management Care Blog.  Check it out and add it to your RSS feed.  Jaan is eminently qualified to write on the topic — he spent 25 years at Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania as a practicing physician and as an executive, [...]

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Despite Limited Penetration, Integrated Delivery Systems Have Advanced Chronic Care

The 1990’s experiment around development of integrated delivery systems (IDSs) mostly did not take root. This experiment was primarily about financial integration — doctors joining with hospitals so that they could together contract with health insurers for capitated reimbursement, hospitals starting their own health plan, or hospitals buying physician practices as a way of guaranteeing [...]

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One More Dark Cloud in the Stormy Skies of Medicare DM

Mathematica Research has just released a report: The Evaluation of the Medicare Coordinated Care Demonstration: Findings for the First Two Years.  It’s not pretty. Section F of the Executive Summary is entitled “Synthesizing the Findings: What Works, and What Doesn’t”.  That section begins: Given that few of the programs have shown convincing evidence to date [...]

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Today’s BFO: How can P4P Work W/O a QB?

Translation  Todays blinding flash of the obvious (BFO): How can you expect pay-for-performance (P4P) programs in Medicare to work with out a designated physician quarterback (QB)? Please allow me to elaborate. P4P programs are based on two assumptions: Patients are assigned to a physician or a practice that will have primary responsibility for their care, [...]

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