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Links: April 23, 2007
End of the Mississippi Medicare Health Support Program
McKesson Health Solutions; April 7, 2007
Recommendations for Integration of Chronic Disease Programs: Are Your Programs Linked?
Preventing Chronic Disease; April 2007
Commercial Health Plans’ Care Management Activities and the Impact on Costs, Quality and Outcomes
Congressional Testimony, Center for Studying Health System Change; April 11, 2007
Straight Talk on Telehealth and Remote Patient Monitoring
You MUST read Dr. Joseph C. Kvedar’s article “Quality, Cost and Connected Health” posted on The Health Care Blog.
Lessons learned include:
Feedback changes behavior
Adherence is a forgotten opportunity
Providers are ready to engage, but need to be led
Dr. Kvedar is Director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners Healthcare System in Boston. The Center for Connected Health is a leading provider focused organization promoting innovations in telehealth and remote patient monitoring technologies. Dr. Kvedar is an advisor to the e-CareManagement blog.
Joe, […]
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 a future base of patients and revenues.
The systems and processes needed jointly to manage financial and clinical risk were an afterthought; information technology was not […]
United’s Move to Fine Physicians: The Other POV
Joe Paduda at the Managed Care Matters blog makes some great counterpoints defending United Health’s moves threatening to fine doctors for making out-of-network lab referrals. I recommend that you read his essay and his readers comments.
In my posting from a couple days ago — Doctors and Health Plans: Can Care Management Opportunities Reconcile the Hatfields and the McCoys? — I picked on United Health Care to make a point. Just to recap, my reasoning is that physicians could (and should) be important partners […]
Doctors and Health Plans: Can Care Management Opportunities Reconcile the Hatfields and the McCoys?
I’m going to try something different in this blog posting. I’d like to introduce a fairly open-ended issue that 1) is of great importance, and 2) is highly debatable. I’ll be the first to admit that my thinking about this is half baked.
Here’s the issue. Over the coming years, will health plans and doctors:
Continue to have adversarial relationship such as they’ve had over the past decades (ala Hatfields v. McCoys, cats v. dogs, oil and water), or
Is there strategic potential for […]
Medicare and DM: Synthesis in 500 Words
Can I interest you in a 2 minute summary of DM in Medicare? Please read my posting Medicare Chronic Disease Management Direction? It’s Anybody’s Guess on the World Health Care Blog.
The World Health Care Blog is a unique experiment sponsored by the World Health Care Congress. Please also check out the excellent health care blogs of my fellow bloggers:
Tony Chen at Hospital Impact
Emily Devoto at The Antidote: Counterspin for Health Care and Health News
Matthew Holt at The Health Care Blog
Derek Lowe at In the […]
Introducing: the POE Award and the POO Award
Today I’m introducing two new awards:
The POE Award — for plain old English
The POO Award — for pervasive obfuscatory oration
When I work on projects, the room typically has a combination of people who are native speakers of three very different languages:
Yet Another Dark Cloud in the Stormy Skies of Medicare DM
Medicare’s major thrust at chronic disease management innovation — the Medicare Health Support (MHS) pilot project — continues to gather storm clouds.
Today’s POO (persistent obfuscatory orations) Award goes to Healthways for their explanation of MHS progress (or lack thereof) in an April 4 press release. If you can understand what they’re saying about MHS (see p. 3) without having your CPA explain it, you’re a lot smarter than I am:
The recently received sixth quarterly CMS report for the MHS pilots continued to cumulatively […]
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 of reducing beneficiaries’ need for hospitalizations and saving money or of improving the quality of care received, there is relatively little assessment that can be done yet […]
Healthcare Informatics Webinar — Disease Management (DM): Will Providers Seize the Opportunity to Be Back in Charge?
Next Thursday April 12, Dr. Randy Williams and I will jointly be presenting our perspectives in a webinar entitled:.
Disease Management (DM): Will Providers Seize the Opportunity to Be Back in Charge?
Click the link for details about the agenda and registration You can receive a 15% discount by entering the following Promotional Code: 0412VK