Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
A number of studies have claimed that increased health expenditures may result in no better, or even worse outcomes. For instance, a paper by Fisher et al. (2003) looking at patients with acute myocardial infarction, colorectal cancer, or hip fracture finds that “Quality of care in higher-spending regions was no better on most measures and…
A recent paper by Basch et al. 2017, found that electronic patient-reported symptom monitoring improved patient overall survival by 5 months. This finding came from a randomized clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering. For patients in the arm with electronic patient-reported symptom monitoring, when “…participants reported a severe or worsening symptom, an email alert was triggered to a clinical…
There are numerous value frameworks being developed by an alphabet soup of organizations including ACC/AHA, ASCO, ICER, MSKCC, NCCN, and others. These organizations generally represent providers or payer perspective on value. But what does “value” mean to patients? The National Patient Advocate Foundation (PAF) provides their thoughts in a recent white paper titled “The Roadmap to…
Quality of care often is seen as how physicians and other health care providers treat patients with a given disease. Accurately diagnosing the disease a patient has, however, is in almost all cases a necessary condition to provide high-quality treatment. Nevertheless, a physician’s ability to accurately diagnose a disease is rarely measured within exsting 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,…
There have been a number of studies that have examined how publicly reporting quality ratings (for health plans, physicians, hospitals or other health care providers) affects market share. Less attention has been paid to the effect of measured quality on health care prices. A paper by Huang and Hirth (2016) aim to answer just this…
Nobel Prize winner Bengt Holmström talks about the pros and cons of pay-for-performance. Interesting throughout.