FDA Guidance: Methods for identifying what is important to patients

What disease components are most burdensome to patients? How do researchers find this information out? To answer this question, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently put out its second guidance document on Patient-Focused Drug Development: Methods to Identify What Is Important to Patients. A few qualitative approaches they recommend to collect this information include:…

Challenges facing the accountable care organization (ACO) system

An interesting article in Modern Healthcare reviews some discussion at a recent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) meeting. The first issue is that the pool of fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries is shrinking, at least on a relative basis. As Medicare Advantage grows each year, population-based alternative payment models like accountable care organizations are left with a…

Quality of Care at Teaching Hospitals

Medicare pays higher reimbursement to teaching hospitals through indirect medical education (IME) payments to hospitals that train a high share of residents. IME inflate standard reimbursements in an attempt to compensate hospitals for these additional costs. Medicare also pay hospitals directly for some cost of training residents through the graduate medical education (GME). A key…

Did the Oncology Care Model produce cost savings?

The answer is ‘yes’, but the magnitude of these savings are relatively small and more than offset by additional OCM program costs. Keating et al. (2021) writes: In this exploratory difference-in-differences study of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries with cancer undergoing chemotherapy (483 310 beneficiaries with 987 332 episodes treated at 201 OCM participating practices and 557 354 beneficiaries with…