Reform Moves Stir Talk of Bundled Payments | BNET Healthcare Blog | BNET

A BNet article, Reform Moves Stir Talk of Bundled Payments, discusses healthcare reformers’ conceptualizing bundling payments to align physician and health system/hospital outcome interests.  The article has a number of cites to other reports, discussions and administration statements.  It also points out what I find facinating about the trend — what did not occur in the 1990s may be coming through healthcare payment reform today.   But are today’s integrated delivery systems (and the regulatory environment) prepared for risk in any format other than PPS payments?

All of this reminds some observers of the rapid formation of integrated delivery systems during the ‘90s, when many hospitals and physicians were circling the wagons to fend off the expected onslaught of capitated managed care plans. That never materialized in most places, but many systems retained all or some of their employed primary-care physicians. Now, partly in expectation of healthcare reform, they’re also stepping up their hiring of specialists.

“The handwriting is on the wall,” Bill Jessee, MD, president and CEO of the Medical Group Management Association, tells BNET. “The push is going to be towards more integration of physicians, hospitals, home health, and other services. And Medicare or a private insurer may put the provider at risk, instead of the insurer being at risk. It’s not explicit, but it’s implicit in a lot of the reform discussions that that’s the direction they’d like to move. The bundled payment demonstrations are a manifestation of that.”

via Reform Moves Stir Talk of Bundled Payments | BNET Healthcare Blog | BNET.

Filed under: Comparative Effectiveness Rearch, Health Law, Payment, Reform, Economics, Health, Health Law, Health Reform

Variations in Healthcare Spending – Anchor-Tenant Theory and Fraud and Abuse?

The New Yorker recently had a very interesting expose discussing one of the fundamental economic challenges of healthcare reform.  (Gawande, Atul, The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care, June 1, 2009).  Peter Orszag gave a presentation last year at the American Health Lawyers meeting in San Franscisco that I was able to hear.  Mr. Orszag, President Obama’s budget director and formerly head of the Congressional Budget Office, has observed repeatedly (and is quoted in this article as saying) that “[n]early thirty per cent of Medicare’s costs could be saved without negatively affecting health outcomes if spending in high- and medium-cost areas could be reduced to the level in low-cost areas.”  He, and many healthcare economists’ observe, that there is a tremendous amount of variation in healthcare spending throughout various regions of the country that simply cannot be explained after controling for demographics, illness indexes/cases mixes, cost indexes and other similar factors.  And, most importantly, outcomes are no better in higher spending areas.

This New Yorker article paints a narrative story surrounding this frequent observations by looking at case of McAllen, Texas.  McAllen has the particular notoriety of having the highest per capital Medicare spending in the nation.   I think it is an important read for healthcare counsel because of some of the author’s tangential commentary linking McAllen’s higher per capita spending with a culture that could have support higher incidents of fraud and abuse.

According to the article, McAllen spends (using 2006 data) approximately $15,000 per Medicare enrollee.  This is more than twice of what El Paso, Texas, with very similar demographics and population factors, pays.  It is also more than twice what the region surrounding the Mayo Clinic spends.  Ironically, the per capital Medicare spending is more than McAllen’s per capita income.

The New Yorker author discusses this fact with some local physicians who have no idea of this distinction for their community:

One night, I went to dinner with six McAllen doctors. All were what you would call bread-and-butter physicians: busy, full-time, private-practice doctors who work from seven in the morning to seven at night and sometimes later, their waiting rooms teeming and their desks stacked with medical charts to review.  Some were dubious when I told them that McAllen was the country’s most expensive place for health care. I gave them the spending data from Medicare. In 1992, in the McAllen market, the average cost per Medicare enrollee was $4,891, almost exactly the national average. But since then, year after year, McAllen’s health costs have grown faster than any other market in the country, ultimately soaring by more than ten thousand dollars per person. “Maybe the service is better here,” the cardiologist suggested. People can be seen faster and get their tests more readily, he said.  Others were skeptical. “I don’t think that explains the costs he’s talking about,” the general surgeon said. “It’s malpractice,” a family physician who had practiced here for thirty-three years said. “McAllen is legal hell,” the cardiologist agreed. Doctors order unnecessary tests just to protect themselves, he said. Everyone thought the lawyers here were worse than elsewhere. That explanation puzzled me. Several years ago, Texas passed a tough malpractice law that capped pain-and-suffering awards at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Didn’t lawsuits go down? “Practically to zero,” the cardiologist admitted. “Come on,” the general surgeon finally said. “We all know these arguments are bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple.” Doctors, he said, were racking up charges with extra tests, services, and procedures.  The surgeon came to McAllen in the mid-nineties, and since then, he said, “the way to practice medicine has changed completely. Before, it was about how to do a good job. Now it is about ‘How much will you benefit?’ ”

via Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.

What is the basis for the higher per capita Medicare spending?

To determine whether overuse of medical care was really the problem in McAllen, I turned to Jonathan Skinner, an economist at Dartmouth’s Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, which has three decades of expertise in examining regional patterns in Medicare payment data. I also turned to two private firms—D2Hawkeye, an independent company, and Ingenix, UnitedHealthcare’s data-analysis company—to analyze commercial insurance data for McAllen. The answer was yes. Compared with patients in El Paso and nationwide, patients in McAllen got more of pretty much everything—more diagnostic testing, more hospital treatment, more surgery, more home care.  The Medicare payment data provided the most detail. Between 2001 and 2005, critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography, two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles. They received one-fifth to two-thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents. And Medicare paid for five times as many home-nurse visits.

The author discusses the high utilization and costs with various hospital executives, who, like the physicians interviewed, also do not know that McAllen is the most expensive place in the country for Medicare beneficiaries.  The executives of the hospitals, to the author’s belief, authentically did not know their peculiar notariety and, not even recognizing it as an issue, had no truly thoughtful responses as to why it might be.

Local executives for hospitals and clinics and home-health agencies understand their growth rate and their market share; they know whether they are losing money or making money. They know that if their doctors bring in enough business—surgery, imaging, home-nursing referrals—they make money; and if they get the doctors to bring in more, they make more. But they have only the vaguest notion of whether the doctors are making their communities as healthy as they can, or whether they are more or less efficient than their counterparts elsewhere. A doctor sees a patient in clinic, and has her check into a McAllen hospital for a CT scan, an ultrasound, three rounds of blood tests, another ultrasound, and then surgery to have her gallbladder removed. How [are the hospital executives] to know whether all that is essential, let alone the best possible treatment for the patient? It isn’t what they are responsible or accountable for.  Health-care costs ultimately arise from the accumulation of individual decisions doctors make about which services and treatments to write an order for. The most expensive piece of medical equipment, as the saying goes, is a doctor’s pen. And, as a rule, hospital executives don’t own the pen caps. Doctors do.

The article suggests, with only a little explanation, that the variation between communities such as McAllen and, in contrast, El Paso or other lower cost regions (with at least the same if not better quality institutions) might be due to an  “anchor tenant theory of economic development.”  Certain markets develop their own economic character, similar to how a mall may be defined by its anchor tenant.  So, the theory goes, certain “anchor tenants” in a market may allow, for example, the development of regional specialization (e.g., biotechnology development in certain cities – Boston, San Franscisco and not in others with similar apparent resources).   Twisting this model a bit, the author posits that the entrepenurial focus of physician medicine in McAllen, changing from the 1990s to present, may be a significant part of the increase in costs.  McAllen was near the median in per capita spending a decade ago.  Importantly, the author then goes on to point out anecdotal evidence of some serious antikickback statute violations — solicitation by certain unnamed physicians of medical directorships in exchange for referrals to hospitals and home health agencies.

This linkage — which is not well developed by the author — is nonetheless a beware moment.   If higher per capita Medicare spending is linked by government enforcement agencies as a proxy for potential higher rates of fraud and abuse behavior, one might see a new horizon for focusing fraud enforcement .  Perhaps this is a stretch – but an interesting linkage is being made here by the author.  It is all the more important due to the prestige of the publication and that the fundamentals of this story find their genesis in the economic theory of healthcare inflation that is the focus of leaders within the current administration.

The author goes on to make a fairly classical example of the challenges of asymetical information in healthcare coupled with the fee-for-service basis of physician payments:

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.

The author aruges that changing the payor (i.e., government plan competitor, single payor system) will not change this problem.  Even putting the consumer on the hook through medical savings accounts or high deductible plans won’t solve it (if a physician recommends a cardiac bypass, is the patient going to negotiate with the cardiologist, radiologist, anesthesiologist, cardiothoracic surgeon and hospital over expense or the scope of the procedure?).

Then the author suggest that only flipping the economic model might fix this.  The author isn’t quite specific in how this might be accomplished, although he goes to length to contrast the McAllen “anchor-tenant” model with other “anchor-tenant” models of healthcare (e.g., Mayo), suggesting this is the crux of the problem – what kind of medical care provision culture the United States will be developing based upon the economic incentives that are established by insurance payor systems we perpetuate or change through reform.  Not by who cuts the check.

This is worth the read because it sets a story narrative for the harder data Mr. Orszag and others have frequently discussed as healthcare reform is debated.

Filed under: AKS, Comparative Effectiveness Rearch, Health Law, Reform, AKS, Conflicts of Interest, Economics, Health Reform, LinkedIn

Birds or Pigs; The Swines Have It?

We’ve had a lot of stories the past several days about the swine flu outbreak in Mexico and smaller groupings of confirmed cases in New York, California and elsewhere in the United States.   There has been years of discussion on the H5N1, so called avian flu, pandemic risks.  We all remember the impact of SARS.  And we’ve been rocked, recently, by what some have tagged a ‘depression’ but all of noted as the largest economic downturn since The Great Depression.  The losses associated with this ‘Great Recession’ are still playing out.

But I was wondering — what if the Swine Flu became a pandemic at this time?  All indication (including the CDC site) indicate that aside from some serious implications for Mexico City’s public health, the cases in the United States have been mild, with no hospitalizations.  The 1918 flu pandemic that took 20m lives world-wide, however, is the standard modern example of potential personal and economic costs of a flu pandemic.  Not to minimize the terrible pain and suffering that such a pandemic would cause by putting an economic slant on it– but I was wondering what might be the economic impact to our already tottering United States economy if a pandemic struck.

So I took a look at a study the CDC had commissioned in 1999.  It showed the potential U.S. economic impact of a pandemic.   The CDC used this as a way to assist the public policy discussion in light of strategies regarding flu immunization — i.e., which immunization policy could provide the best net value in the case of flu pandemics of differing severity.   It’s beyond this post (or its author) to analyze the article and it’s conclusions.  But I thought the numbers were notable and summarize the potential economic exposure (without vaccination).  And, of course, this looks at U.S. exposure only.  A pandemic would have a far reach.  Look how quickly in this age of easy travel the virus spread from Mexico to the United States and even potentially exposed the President of the United States during his trip.  From the CDC’s study:

Without large-scale immunization, the estimates of the total economic impact in the United States of an influenza pandemic ranged from $71.3 billion (5th percentile = $35.4 billion; 95th percentile = $107.0 billion) (gross attack rate of 15%) to $166.5 billion (5th percentile = $82.6 billion; 95th percentile = $249.6 billion) (gross attack rate of 35%) (Table 6). At any given attack rate, loss of life accounted for approximately 83% of all economic losses. Outpatients, persons ill but not seeking medical care, and inpatients accounted for approximately 8%, 6%, and 3%, respectively, of all economic losses (Table 6) (Appendix II).

* * * *

If it cost $21 to vaccinate a person and the effective coverage were 40%, net savings to society would result from vaccinating all age and risk groups (Figure 2). However, vaccinating certain age and risk groups rather than others would produce higher net returns. For example, vaccinating patients ages 20 to 64 years of age not at high risk would produce higher net returns than vaccinating patients ages 65 years of age and older who are at high risk (Figure 2). At a cost of $62 per vaccinee and gross attack rates of less than 25%, vaccinating populations at high risk would still generate positive returns (Figure 2). However, vaccinating populations not at high risk would result in a net loss (Figure 2).

via The Economic Impact of Pandemic Influenza in the United States: Priorities for Intervention.

There’s also an interesting Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment (and see generally the goverment web page)  of possible economic effects of an avian flu pandemic.  That study concludes that a pandemic involving a highly virulent flu strain (such as the one that caused the pandemic in 1918) could produce an impact worldwide similar in depth and duration to an average postwar recession in the United States — but citing studies ranging from a .5% to 6% decrease in GDP.  Query, of course, what impact if such a pandemic hit during an ongoing recession.

Filed under: Comparative Effectiveness Rearch, Health Law, Personal Posts, Pharmacy, Risk Management, Economics, Health Law, Lindedin, Public Health

How Might The Education and Healthcare Sectors Be (Economically) Alike?

Thomas Friedman had an interesting op ed today.  He cited a recent McKinsey Study entitled The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.   I read his op ed, but thought to take a look at the summary of the McKinsey Study.  It points out the potential for huge future improvement opportunity in the educational sector, if only that current opportunity may have been lost.  It also discusses an important similarity between the education sector and the health care sector that is worth remark.

Before briefly discussing the McKinsey study, it uses a report, made a generation ago, “A Nation at Risk”, as a springboard.  I just revisited that report this evening.  I recall reading it in an undergraduate education (elective) class a long time ago.  That 1983 report (by the National Commission on Excellence in Education presented to Secretary of Education) began:

Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world… History is not kind to idlers. The time is long past when American’s destiny was assured simply by an abundance of natural resources and inexhaustible human enthusiasm…We compete with them for international standing and markets, not only with products but also with the ideas of our laboratories and neighborhood workshops. America’s position in the world may once have been reasonably secure with only a few exceptionally well-trained men and women. It is no longer.

This McKinsey study asks the question: if we had effectively acted in 1983 and closed the international, racial and class/economic gaps in US k-12 educuation, where would we be today?  They stay away from the ‘moral’ and ‘equity’ component of fulfillment of some of the aspects of that old report’s recommendations and keep it at the level of national economic productivity.  The answer is that if we had done better, we’d be, as a society, a lot richer.

We’re now in the midst of the greatest economic downturn in generations.  Economists thinks that the current ‘Great Recession’ has depressed economic output of the United States by somewhere between $1T to $2T.  If the McKinsey study analysis is to be believed, however, we are experiencing staggering lost opportunities in gross national product performance that surpass even those numbers.  The study puts it this way:

[T]he international achievement gap is imposing on the US economy an invisible yet recurring economic loss [of $1.2T to $2.3T per year] that is greater than the output shortfall in what has been called the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In addition, the racial [gap of between $310B to $525B per year], income [gap of $400B to $670B per year], and system achievement gap[] [of $425B to $700B] all impose annual output shortfalls that are greater than what the nation experienced in the recession of 1981–82, the deepest downturn in the postwar period until now. In other words, the educational achievement gaps in the United States have created the equivalent of a permanent, deep recession in terms of the gap between actual and potential output in the economy.

Fundamentally,  our society is experiencing lost opportunity and it affects all of us in very real objective ways.  But lost opportunity is opportunity that can be regained.  So, where is this opportunity?  The healthcare sector and the education sector share an important and remarkable trait according to the McKinsey study authors.  As the McKinsey article points out:

The most striking, poorly understood, and ultimately hopeful fact about the educational achievement gaps in the United States involves the huge differences in performance found between school systems, especially between systems serving similar students. This situation is analogous to that found across American health care, where, as researchers like John Wennberg have shown, wide regional variations in costs and utilization of procedures and services exist that bear no relation to quality or health outcomes. In each case, these differences prove there are substantial opportunities to improve…

While at the racial and economic level there are sizable differences in attainment — controlling for these demographic differences one still finds amazing variations in student achievement.   The study authors point out that research shows that these variations “exist at every level in American education: among states, among districts within states, among schools within districts, and among classrooms within schools.”   “Intuition” and “research” suggest that differences in “public policies, systemwide strategies, school site leadership, teaching practice, and perhaps other systemic investments can fundamentally influence student achievement.”

The authors also point out that there seem to be gross inefficiencies in the educational sector.   While they do not extend, by analogy, to the health care sector, I’ve seen other studies that could.  Despite the United State’s very significant per capita education spending, we might have one of the least cost-effective educational systems in the world. The study authors report that by “one measure we get 60 percent less for our education dollars in terms of average test-score results than do other wealthy nations.”  In other words, as the chart from the report shows, we spend more per student to obtain one point on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) Math test (2003 data) than any other nation.  We pay a lot to perform far less well than our international peers.

While the authors do not make very specific recommendations regarding reform, ultimately, their main forward looking conclusion can be summed up by the Lord Kelvin observation:  ‘if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.’  The corollary — if you can measure it, and use “relentless efforts to benchmark and implement what works[,]” performance can be significantly improved.

This is an interesting and sober read and I recommend it.

Filed under: Comparative Effectiveness Rearch, Health Law, Personal Posts, Economics, Education, LinkedIn, The Great Recess

The Public and the Health Care Delivery System

The Kaiser Family Foundation, NPR and the Harvard School of Public Health recently conducted a poll of public attitudes concerning EHR, coordination of care, patient and doctor interaction around effectiveness and cost, the cost of care, the role of government and insurers in cost and comparative effectiveness, the uninsured and cost.  I found a few of the findings from the survey of note.

• A larger portion of respondents (34%) thought that EHR’s would actually increase costs of healthcare in America than decrease (22%) it.  Even more (39%) thought it would increase their own family’s healthcare costs!

• There is significant concern about unauthorized access (76%) to online medical records.

• A significant minority (40%) of Americans report at least minor problems with coordinating care between their different doctors, while half say this is not a problem at all. A smaller minority (17%) say they experience “major problems” coordinating their health care services.   Interesting, those Americans who reported having personally experienced at least three ‘coordination of care’ issues are much more likely (63%) to see overtreatment in the system as a whole compared to other Americans (48%).

• About half (49%) think that overutilization is a major problem.  Of course, only a minority (16%) say that they have received unnecessary care and a bit more than half (56%) think that insurance companies should have to cover expensive treatments even if they have not been proven more effective than other, less expensive options.

• A significant majority of Americans  (72%) believe that there is not always clear scientific evidence about which treatment is likely to work best for any one patient.  But only a small minority (9%) say that they have received an expensive medical test or treatment in which a less expensive alternative would have been just as good.

• A significant majority of Americans (65%) say their doctor’s charges are reasonable and (63%) believe that their doctor is working to keep the cost of their health care down.

• There is a significant disconnect between the actual cost of insurance and what uninsured Americans are willing to spend for insurance.  Majorities report being willing to pay $25, $50 or even $100 per month for coverage, but only a minority (29%) would pay $200 per month, and only a very small minority (6%) say they would pay $400.  (Nationwide, annual premiums averaged $2,613 for single coverage and $5,799 for family plans in the 2006-2007 period).

The WSJ Health Blog commented on this survey: while patient seem to recognize that there is waste in the system, it wasn’t their physician.  She’s perfect.

Filed under: Comparative Effectiveness Rearch, Health Law, Reform, Economics, Health, LinkedIn

The Health Care Blog: “Mr. Obama, Tear Down These (Hospital) Walls”

On the Healthcare Blog, Rober Wachter analyzes the recent NEJM report on hospital readmissions, the related NEJM article on whether bundling payments could solve this and the Obama administration’s healthcare reform plan that requires significant savings regarding post-discharge healthcare in order to effect Medicare savings.  The New York Times also published an article on this April 1, 2009.

Wachter writes:

[T]he DRG system created a big black hole, and it is time to fill it. It’s called the post-discharge period. And one large part of the detritus emerging from that hole is readmissions. You probably saw this week’s NEJM study by Stephen Jencks (a former Medicare official and now a Baltimore-based consultant), and my pals Mark Williams and Eric Coleman, of Northwestern and Colorado, respectively. The study found that 20% of Medicare patients are readmitted within a month of discharge, and one-third return within 90 days. Even more remarkably, by a year out more than half of patients (56%) discharged from an acute care hospital are re-hospitalized. The authors estimate that the cost of preventable readmissions was $17 billion in 2004 (the study year), which would make it more like $25 billion today.

via The Health Care Blog: “Mr. Obama, Tear Down These (Hospital) Walls”.

Wachter also summarizes some interesting points of the study:

Like so many things in healthcare, there was striking geographic variation in readmission rates – from a low of 13% in Idaho to 23% in Washington, D.C.

There were also variations by DRG, with the highest readmission rates in patients with heart failure, psychosis, vascular and cardiac surgery, and COPD – pointing the way toward targeted interventions.

More than half the patients readmitted within 30 days appeared not to have had an outpatient visit between hospital discharge and readmission, perhaps another target for intervention.

Most (70%) surgical patients who are readmitted come back for a medical diagnosis such as pneumonia or UTI.

Approximately 30% of readmitted patients come back to a different hospital, so hospitals will underestimate the extent of their readmission problem by looking solely at their own bounce-backs.

via The Health Care Blog: “Mr. Obama, Tear Down These (Hospital) Walls”.

Wachter continues and and discusses why this is becoming critical (healthcare reform/savings dollars) and the health system’s current state as it relates to discharge planning/readmissions:

The Obama budget plan depends on figuring this out. The budget, which aims to save $300 billion (which used to seem like a lot of money) in Medicare/Medicaid costs over the next decade, includes a projected $26 billion in savings from “driving down hospital readmission rates for Medicare patients” …The manifestations of this myopic focus on hospitalization as the unit of analysis can be seen in the paucity of attention that hospitals give post-discharge care. Studies have chronicled a litany of post-discharge disasters…In other words, when it comes to post-discharge care, we suck…Despite powerful literature that shows that simple interventions – like post-discharge phone calls or the use of a transitions coach – can lead to impressive improvements in post-discharge care and decreased readmission and return-to-ED rates, few hospitals have put these interventions in place.

Wacther then makes an observation concerning financial efforts to address the system’s performance in this area:

Harvard’s Arnie Epstein reviews the policy initiatives addressing readmissions – including those that are here today (publishing readmission rates on the Web) and those being actively discussed (financial penalties to hospitals with high readmission rates). But the Cool Kid on the Payment Block is “bundling” – aggregating  payments for doctors and hospitals for a period of time after an illness (an “episode of care”) in an effort to create accountable integrated entities that will improve care across the continuum (the entities somehow have to split up the spoils between hospitals, hospitalists, SNFs, primary care docs, specialists, care coordinators… Have fun with that). Epstein’s verdict: worthy of pilot studies, but “the likelihood that [bundling] will prove to be a successful model is still uncertain.”

He recognizes the challenges, and the laments, of hospitals, that have difficulties in controlling other healthcare provider’s post-discharge data.  Why, hospitals ask, can you hold us responsible if we are not in control of this.

I would also put on the table that if the government goes this route, query if it makes any sense to maintain Medicare CoP restrictions on promotion of hospital/health system owned and controlled providers — such as those exist for home health.

He observes that there are tools ready out there to assist hospitals in this area, including those developed through the Society of Hospital Medicine and its “splendid” Project Boost.

Finally, he observes that “I, like you, don’t know where the money will come from for all of this.”   I tend to disagree.  I pretty much know where (most of) the money will come from — where the largest portion of the Medicare premium dollar comes from — inpatient admissions.   Get ready!

Filed under: Comparative Effectiveness Rearch, Health Law, Medicare, Payment, Quality Reporting, Reform, Risk Management, Economics, Finance, Health, Health Law

Hospital Doors Revolve for Many Medicare Patients – Health Blog – WSJ

The WSJ Health Blog reports on April 2, 2009 that MEDPAC is recommending restructuring hospital payments in a “bundle” to incentive hospitals to minimize readmissions of Medicare patients.  We’ll see how this plays out, but I can certain envision greater integration of bundled prospective payments for, at least, certain types of admissions.

Some 20% of Medicare patients discharged from the hospital are readmitted within a month, and 34% return within three months, according to a study published in the current New England Journal of Medicine. Unplanned rehospitalizations cost Medicare $17.4 billion in 2004, the study says…MedPac, a commission that advises Congress on Medicare policy, has recommended that Medicare start a pilot program in which “bundled” payments extend beyond the first hospital stay to include, say, the first 30 days after discharge. The idea, which is also part of President Obama’s budget proposal, is that if hospitals get paid fixed rates for caring for certain conditions — and they don’t get paid more for those same conditions if patients return — hospitals will have a financial incentive to reduce the risk of readmission.

via Hospital Doors Revolve for Many Medicare Patients – Health Blog – WSJ.

Filed under: Comparative Effectiveness Rearch, Health Law, Medicaid, Medicare, Payment, Quality Reporting, Reform, Economics, Finance, Health, Health Law

Healthcare Economist · Comparison of Pharmacists and Primary Care Providers as Immunizers

In his Healthcare Economist blog, Jason Shafrin writes about a recent paper he wrote with John Fontanesi, Jan Hirsch, Sarah Lorentz, and Debra Bowers and had published in American Journal of Pharmaceutical Benefits.  The paper (which I have not reviewed) analyzes the efficacy and quality of immunizations as provided in primary care offices and pharmacies in California.  The abstact is below and observes that from a consistency, cost and productivity stand point, pharmacies might be a better alternative. 

This study examines the potential role of “alternative community immunizers,” specifically pharmacists, in providing immunization services. A convenience sampling of almost 700 adults eligible for vaccinations was taken from 15 ambulatory care settings and 11 pharmacies in San Diego, California between 2006 and 2008. The results of the study found that patient characteristics and beliefs were similar between primary care and pharmacies, but pharmacies proved more consistent in following safety protocols; had lower unit costs; and were more efficient, with greater productivity. We conclude that pharmacies combine the best immunization practices of routine scheduled primary care visits and mass influenza vaccination clinics, but gaps still exist in pharmacies’ ability to effectively transmit immunization records securely and provider willingness to embrace these “alternative immunizers.“

via Healthcare Economist · Comparison of Pharmacists and Primary Care Providers as Immunizers.

Filed under: Comparative Effectiveness Rearch, Drug Policy, Health Law, Pharmacy, Primary Care, Quality Reporting, Reform, Risk Management, Economics, Health, Health Law

Coming Soon: Comparative Effectiveness Research for Biotech – Health Blog – WSJ

WSJ Health Blog reports:

[T]he NIH has published a list of high-priority projects it wants to fund, providing a clearer picture of just how that money may be spent. The list — online here — suggests scrutiny for some of the best-selling drugs for heart conditions and asthma, among others. The NIH would fund research laying the groundwork “to study clinical and cost-effectiveness of biologics to determine the best therapy for individual patients.” This could include reviewing existing research or computer-based modeling of clinical trials to predict outcomes. Spokespeople for some of the manufacturers told Dow Jones Newswires they believe the drugs are cost-effective, citing the severity of the diseases and the drugs’ effectiveness at treating them***The NIH plans to give out about $400 million of the comparative-effectiveness funding to researchers at academic and other institutions over the next two years. That’s not nearly enough to support multiple large-scale clinical trials, but it could add a therapy to an ongoing trial, an NIH spokeswoman said, or support other methods of research like analyses of past trials.

Wonder how quickly the Stimulus money for Comparative Effectiveness Research will spend out?

See also an earlier WSJ article prior to passage of the Stimulus law.

via Coming Soon: Comparative Effectiveness Research for Biotech – Health Blog – WSJ.

Filed under: Comparative Effectiveness Rearch, Health Law, Reform, Economics, Health Law