topic: Accountable Care Organizations
Five Lessons for Making Your Care Coordination Efforts a Lasting Reality By Crystal Cox Cooper and Robin Figueroa
Care coordination can make the difference toward achieving more consistently positive patient health outcomes. It also helps providers meet several new and increasing outcomes-related financial incentives.
Improve Clinical Interactions to Increase Patient Engagement and Bottom Line Results
It is easy to picture an internist lamenting his patients’ seeming inability to improve their health by making better lifestyle choices: “If I could just get some of my patients to eat less, exercise more and quit smoking, they’d have a much greater quality of life and need to see me far less.”
Conference Reveals New Provider Perspectives in Patient Engagement By Jim Buckheit
As seen in Becker's Hospital Review. We hear the term “patient engagement” often, but is it really making a difference in terms of patient experience and outcomes? According to a recent NEJM Catalyst Insights Council survey of 340 hospital or health care executives, clinicians and clinical leaders, less than a quarter of their patients were highly engaged in their care decisions and just 9 percent of respondents reported high...
ACOs: Implementing and Sustaining Value-Based Change By Bob Wadsworth
As seen in Health Intelligence Network. Just as “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” neither is an efficient, sustainable, and physician-focused accountable care organization (ACO). Instead, expect to embrace a stair-step approach to making the necessary changes in your care delivery and administrative practices. Competency and capability development is always multi-dimensional, so consider these five steps as a benchmark for your organization’s critical thinking on ACO development. Introduction In California, we’re now in what could be termed the “second generation”...
A Roadmap for Meeting ICD-10: Taking a Break is Not an Option
Since the deadline for ICD-10 compliance has been delayed until October 2015, healthcare organizations may be tempted to ignore the initiative for several months. Most of our clients have gone into a slow-down period after getting their technical side compliant. According to Healthcare IT News, the annual report to Congress from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology shows that 59 percent of hospitals and 48 percent of physicians had at least a basic EHR system. Among...
How to Win in the Small Employer Health Insurance Market
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has focused so much attention on the individual marketplace that the sweeping changes in the small employer marketplace have almost gone unnoticed. For many health plans, small employers represent an important book of business. The insurance companies who are the first to adapt their business to embrace the post-reform small employer market will realize gains in market share without sacrificing margins. The mass exodus from the small employer market, predicted by many, did not materialize. It...
ACOs: Now What? The Next Step in the Future of Health Care
Is the Accountable Care Organization (ACO) model sustainable? In their first years, ACOs focused on reducing health care utilization: decreasing avoidable admissions, readmissions, and emergency department visits, as well as increasing generic medication fills. As demonstrated in various local and national ACO initiatives, when hospitals, providers, and payer groups collaborate, they tend to succeed in that goal. Health care utilization decreases, post-discharge care improves, and efforts are streamlined to minimize duplication. These activities have yielded a significant return on investment...