Earlier this month, Mercy Health announced deals to dismantle HealthSpan (the former Kaiser business in northeast Ohio acquired in 2013), selling the insurance arm to local powerhouse Med Mutual, dissolving the medical group, and transitioning physicians to various northeast Ohio providers. 2015 was supposed to be a growth year for the business, but membership declined across lines of business, PMPM costs ballooned and Exchange risk adjustment obligations wreaked havoc with the bottom line ( HealthSpan is said to cover 160K lives total, of which half are risk with the legacy Kaiser operation and its PPO sister and 45K Mercy employees… Read More
Rewarding patient loyalty vs. earning patient loyalty
A new article in JAMA recommends that ACOs and health systems develop patient loyalty programs comparable to those offered by coffee shops, hotels and airlines (McMahon et al, “Health System Loyalty Program – An Innovation in Customer Care and Service” JAMA, March 1, 2016) . The value of patient loyalty to the health system is clear: greater share of wallet plus an ability to manage patients’ health in a more integrated way. Integration should be valuable to the patient as well, but – conditioned perhaps by years of being asked to repeat their medical history to every member of… Read More
Defining success in health care A perspective advertising yeoman’s work of the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) which has defined specific metrics for dozens of diseases for which there are no widely accepted standards defined so far. If followed broadly, this will greatly facilitate performance comparisons across systems, improvement of processes of care delivery, and the implementation of value based contracting. Standardizing Patient Outcomes Measurement (free access) Public health gets no respect A lament on how population health interventions tend to be beholden to positive ROI standards (i.e. will we save money by keeping at… Read More
Centene bringing a new managed care strategy to The Big House?
Correctional health and correctional pharmacy 2.2M people are incarcerated in local jails and state and federal prisons at any one time in the U.S. for whose healthcare various government agencies are responsible. This aggregate number hides some important segment differentiation (see table). Local jails are housing a little over 700K on any average day but typically for a short period of time (on average a month or less), implying over 11M people flowing through the jail system in any one year (boldly assuming few repeated tours). Less than a month is relatively little time to identify and… Read More
The Walgreens-Advocate deal: end of urgent care’s strategic neutrality in Chicago?
This past January, Walgreens assigned operational control of 56 in-store clinics to Advocate Health. The deal signals another intensification of the already fierce hospital competition in Chicago, and may have implications for the future of urgent care broadly. Prisoner’s dilemma Healthcare’s market failures often prevent the timely exit of redundant capacity, so any new care capacity ends up raising – rather than reallocating –fixed costs across a market. Urgent care, which is enjoying widespread and rapid growth, can be an exception: many providers lack the scale and geographic concentration of patients to support attractive after-hours care. As a result,… Read More
NEJM Highlights January 2016: a medley of social service, OB, data mining, obesity, and ESRD
Leveraging community services for health In poor individuals, a lot of health issues are intimately connected to their socioeconomic circumstances. However, at the system level, there has been a chronic lack of integration between social and health services. Several efforts have tried to remedy this, notably through integration of the Medicare and Medicaid components for duals in the financial alignment demonstration projects sponsored by CMS. But a there are a lot of social services that are not part of Medicaid; and recognizing the need to ensure awareness, and access, CMS is sponsoring experiments (with control arms) to pay providers… Read More
Observations on NextGen ACO’s first cohort of participants
Earlier this month, CMS announced the first cohort of Next Generation ACO (“NGACO”) providers (see here our summary of the key changes made in the Next Generation). Below are a few thoughts on who signed up: The Next Generation cohort is diverse The cohort of 21 participants has the flavor of a structured pilot: Heritage mix: 8 are former Pioneer ACOs (with 232K lives attributed in 2014), 8 came out of former MSSP ACOs (217K lives attributed in 2014) and 5 are new to the CMS ACO program but with some experience in commercial ACO arrangements… Read More
Leif Solberg and team published research last month contrasting how patients value outcomes vs. how physicians think patients value outcomes. The approach was novel: they asked patients! They identified patients with an MRI or CT for abdominal or back pain and asked them (first in an open-ended way to identify 21 outcomes and then more systematically) to rate the importance of outcomes (e.g., find cause of pain, return to normal life functions, avoid surgery, etc.) on a 5 point scale (5=highest). They then asked PCPs to put themselves in the shoes of patients and rate the same outcomes. The… Read More
A new focus on the diagnostic reliability of clinicians Two perspectives highlighting the recent report from the National Academy of Medicine (formerly IOM) entitled “Improving Diagnosis in Health Care”. Diagnostic error has long been the invisible side of poor medicine compared to medication errors, or a towel forgotten inside the patient and the like. But the growth of health IT is both exposing diagnostic error and bearing the seeds of a solution, initially through rule-based automated checks and reminders, but likely eventually through a much more guideline driven practice of medicine with clinical decision support tools. Reducing Diagnostic Errors… Read More
Earlier this month, researchers released a study of patient-initiated emails to providers with Northern California Kaiser Permanente (KPNC) in 2011/12 in the JAMC . The study focused on patients with one or more chronic condition (CDC data indicates this would be about 50% of an average population) but otherwise sought a mix of conditions, benefit designs and demographics among its participants. Respondents were asked about their use of email in the previous 12 months. The study found substantial patient initiation of email contacts: Of the 71% in the sample with regular access to the internet, 79% said they… Read More