Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
“Value” is the latest trend in health care. However, how does value get integrated into reimbursement? One approach to tying value to prices is through and outcomes based contract (OBC) where the reimbursement for a drug will depend on the real world outcomes experienced by the relevant patient population. A study by Nazareth et al.…
Are physicians ready for value-based payment? That is the question a recent paper by Markovitz et al. (2017) attempts to answer. This question is not hypothetical as the Medicare Access and Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (MACRA) requires physicians to choose between the current fee-for-service structure under the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) or…
An interesting editorial in JAMA by Schuster, Onorato and Meltzer (2017) makes the following point: So how should quality measures be prioritized? Many factors are currently considered, including a measure’s expected effect on patients and health care, potential for promoting improvement, scientific underpinnings, usability, and feasibility. But there is a major omission from this list:…
David Augus and and Dana Goldman weigh in on Novartis’ decision to price their new chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy known as Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel). The treatment represents ground-breaking technology, but is priced at $475,000 per treatment. But the authors note that there is something else novel about this technology: There was another announcement from…
Background Do pay-for-performance (P4P) programs work? P4P programs pay paying providers (or health plans) more if they have better outcomes or follow specific best practices. Whether or not they lead to better outcomes has been much debated. However, many P4P programs implemented in the real world have been evaluated using a pre-post design which could…
Please check out my latest publication in Value in Health titled “Value-Based Payments and Incentives to Improve Care: A Case Study of Patients with Type 2 Diabetes in Medicare Advantage“. This work is based on research conducted with my co-authors Jesse Sussell, Kata Bognar, Taylor T. Schwartz, John J. Sheehan, Wade Aubry, and Dennis Scanlon,…
Value-based payment is the latest hot topic. One question remains, however, does it work? Does paying for quality improve quality. A study by Zuckerman et al. (2016) finds that the hospital readmissions reduction program (HRRP) did appear to reduce re-hospitalization rates among the targeted conditions. What about the hospital value-based purchasing program (HVBP). Beginning in…
Value-based payment for providers is often predicated on being able to measure physician quality with a single composite measures. For instance, Medicare’ s Value-Based Payment Modifier (Value Modifier) combines a variety of individual quality metrics across domains to create a single quality score. Payment to physicians is adjusted based on a combination of physician quality…
How do you measure the quality of care patients with cancer receive? How long they live? Avoiding side effects? Patient satisfaction? Process measures? Further, there are multiple types of cancer and different cancer have different recommended treatments and methods of providing care. To further complicate the issue, new cancer treatments are being introduced in rapid succession;…
An interesting story at AJMC on a new type of wellness program that better aligns outcomes with reimbursement: “Most wellness programs are like most gym memberships,” Adam Fawer, Noom’s chief operating officer, said in an interview. Employers have spent lots of money on programs that fail to help or even reach most of the staff,…