Cooperating for better care.

Medicare

Tag Archives

Hospitals not using drug-discount-program savings to improve care for the underserved

January 29, 2018by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , ,

A new study says that hospitals that have been saving money through 340B program discounts have generally not been been using  those savings to improve care for low-income and  other underserved patients, although that’s been one of the program’s missions.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the New York University School of Medicine studied data on Medicare beneficiaries from hospitals with 50 or more beds that were just above or below the 340B program’s 11.75 percent disproportionate share hospital threshold.

According to FierceHealthcare, “They found that hospitals eligible for 340B discounts administered more drugs, and also increased their ability to administer more drugs by absorbing physician practices, particularly in oncology. The study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that 340B participation was linked to an increased number of hematologist–oncologists, ophthalmologists or rheumatologists working in the hospital.

“The study also analyzed the impact of the program on quality improvements and mortality rates for low-income patients and found little evidence that hospitals were investing the 340B savings in these areas. ”

“We found evidence of hospitals behaving in ways that would generate profits, by building their outpatient capacity to administer drugs,” Sunita Desai, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health at NYU School of Medicine and the study’s senior author, said in a public announcement.  “But we did not see any evidence that hospitals are investing those profits in safety-net clinics, expanding access to care for low-income Medicare patients or improving mortality in their local communities as the program intends.”

To read the New England Journal of Medicine article on the study, please hit this link.

To read the Fierce report, please hit this link.

 

Some home healthcare firms refuse to help patients with Medicare

January 21, 2018by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged

By SUSAN JAFFE

For Kaiser Health News

Colin Campbell needs help dressing, bathing and moving between his bed and his wheelchair. He has a feeding tube because his partially paralyzed tongue makes swallowing “almost impossible,” he said.

Campbell, 58, spends $4,000 a month on home healthcare services so he can continue to live in his home just outside Los Angeles. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” which relentlessly attacks the nerve cells in his brain and spinal cord and has no cure.

The former computer systems manager has Medicare coverage because of his disability, but no fewer than 14 home healthcare providers have told him he can’t use it to pay for their services.

That’s an incorrect but common belief. Medicare does cover home care services for patients who qualify, but incentives intended to combat fraud and reward high quality care are driving some home health agencies to avoid taking on long-term patients such as Campbell, who have debilitating conditions that won’t get better, according to advocates for seniors and the home care industry. Rule changes that took effect this month could make the problem worse.

“We feel Medicare coverage laws are not being enforced and people are not getting the care that they need in order to stay in their homes,” said Kathleen Holt, an attorney and associate director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan law firm. The group is considering legal action against the government.

Federal law requires Medicare to pay indefinitely for home care — with no co-payments or deductibles — if a doctor ordered it and patients can leave home only with great difficulty. They must need intermittent nursing, physical therapy or other skilled care that only a trained professional can provide. They do not need to show improvement. Those who qualify can also receive an aide’s help with dressing, bathing and other daily activities. The combined services are limited to 35 hours a week.

Medicare affirmed this policy in 2013 when it settled a key lawsuit brought by the Center for Medicare Advocacy and Vermont Legal Aid. In that case, the government agreed that Medicare covers skilled nursing and therapy services — including those delivered at home —to maintain a patient’s abilities or to prevent or slow decline. It also agreed to inform providers, bill auditors and others that a patient’s improvement is not a condition for coverage.

Campbell said some home healthcare agencies told him Medicare would pay only for rehabilitation, “with the idea of getting you better and then leaving,” he said. They told him that Medicare would not pay them if he didn’t improve, he said. Other agencies told him Medicare simply did not cover home health care.

Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income adults and families, also covers home health care and other home services, but Campbell doesn’t qualify for it.

Securing Medicare coverage for home health services requires persistence, said John Gillespie, whose mother has gone through five home care agencies since she was diagnosed with ALS in 2014. He successfully appealed Medicare’s decision denying coverage, and afterward Medicare paid for his mother’s visiting nurse as well as speech and physical therapy.

“You have to have a good doctor and people who will help fight for you to get the right company,” said Gillespie, of Orlando, Fla. “Do not take no for an answer.”

Yet a Medicare official did not acknowledge any access problems. “A patient can continue to receive Medicare home health services as long as he/she remains eligible for the benefit,” said spokesman Johnathan Monroe.

But a leading industry group contends that Medicare’s home health care policies are often misconstrued. “One of the myths in Medicare is that chronically ill individuals are not qualified for coverage,” said William Dombi, president of the National Association for Home Care and Hospice, which represents nearly half of the nation’s 12,000 home care providers.

Part of the problem is that some agencies fear they won’t be paid if they take on patients who need their services for a long time, Dombi said. Such cases can attract the attention of Medicare auditors who can deny payments if they believe the patient is not eligible or they suspect billing fraud. Rather than risk not getting paid, some home health agencies “stay under the radar” by taking on fewer Medicare patients who need long-term care, Dombi said.

And they may have a good reason to be concerned. Medicare officials have found that about a third of the agency’s payments to home health companies in the fiscal year ending last September were improper. 

Another factor that may have a negative effect on chronically ill patients is Medicare’s Home Health Compare ratings Web site. It includes grades on patient improvement, such as whether a client got better at walking with an agency’s help. That effectively tells agencies who want top ratings “to go to patients who are susceptible to improvement,” Dombi said.

 

This year, some home care agencies will earn more than just ratings. Under a Medicare pilot program, home health firms in nine states will start receiving payment bonuses for providing good care and those who don’t will pay penalties. Some criteria used to measure performance depend on patient improvement, Holt said.

Another new rule, which recently took effect,  prohibits agencies from discontinuing services for Medicare and Medicaid patients without a doctor’s order. But that, too, could backfire. 

“This is good,” Holt said. “But our concern is that some agencies might hesitate to take patients if they don’t think they can easily discharge them.”

CMS soon to start new voluntary bundled-services plan

January 11, 2018by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , , ,

 

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is implementing a new voluntary bundled services payment model for Medicare.

“BPCI [Bundled Payment for Care Improvement] Advanced builds on the earlier success of bundled payment models and is an important step in the move away from fee-for-service and towards paying for value,” CMS administrator Seema Verma said  Tuesday.

But the Trump administration has resisted  mandatory bundled care models. Indeed, last November CMS canceled mandatory bundled care payment models for hip fractures and cardiac care, and reduced the number of regions required to participate in a bundled-care payment system for joint replacement.

Carter Paine is chief operating officer of CBPCI Advanced, a Brentwood, Tenn.-based company that helps manage patients’ transition to post-acute care and has participated in the older model.  He told Med Page Today that the new bundled-care model, to  start in October, is different in important respects from the older one.

For one thing, he told the news service, CMS is, in Med Page’s paraphrase of his remarks, “incentivizing providers to reduce costs by 3 percent for each episode of care, rather than 2 percent as in the old model.”

In addition, “it lasts longer, up to 2023, which we think is a good thing.”

Mr. Paine added that the fact that CMS has fewer episodes of care to choose from may indicate that “of the 48 original [episode types], many of those weren’t being executed on, so probably they just bore down to episodes that actually have real volume.”

“I think BPCI 1.0 has proven to be successful for those participants that have hung in there. On the last go-round, people were sticking their toes in the water, and a lot of people were too nervous to get in — that felt more like a pilot, and this is more of a long-term commitment. Given the success we’ve had in BPCI 1.0 … I think people will participate more in this one, given there’s a game plan in hand.”

To read more, please hit this link.

 

 

Feds cut Medicare payments to 751 hospitals to penalize them for high patient-injury rates

December 26, 2017by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged ,

By JORDAN RAU

For Kaiser Health News

The federal government Thursday lowered a year’s worth of Medicare payments to 751 hospitals to penalize them for having the highest rates of patient injuries.

More than half also were punished last year through the penalty, which was created by the Affordable Care Act and began four years ago. The program is designed as a financial incentive for hospitals to avoid infections and other mishaps, such as blood clots and bedsores.

The penalties again fell heavily on teaching hospitals, although less than before. A third of them were punished this year, a Kaiser Health News analysis of the penalties found. Last year, the penalty was levied on nearly half of the nation’s teaching hospitals.

The 115 penalized academic medical centers this year include Denver Health Medical Center, Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Stanford Health Care hospitals in California and the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, according to federal records.

“Academic medical centers serve patients with more-complex conditions who are at greater risk of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) compared to community health care providers,” Stanford Health Care said in a written statement. “Hospitals with a high rate of immunocompromised patients will always seem to have higher HAIs.”

Hospitals that treat large proportions of low-income people also were fined more than hospitals with a more affluent patient base, the analysis found. About a third of those safety-net hospitals were penalized, roughly the same as last year.

The penalties have been controversial from the beginning. The hospital industry faults them as unfairly punishing hospitals that treat sicker patients and those that do a better job of identifying infections and other patient complications. Patient advocates say that, while not perfect, the penalties have been a valuable prod to make hospital executives consider more than the bottom line.

“The program has been very instrumental in focusing hospitals on the problems of patient safety and improved quality,” said Dr. Kevin Kavanagh, board chairman of Health Watch USA, a patient advocacy group. However, he said, the financial uncertainty created by the Republican efforts to revoke the Affordable Care Act has not helped.

“Right now it’s hard for hospitals to improve patient safety when there’s been so much turmoil in the health care market,” he said. “The hospitals have the tools and knowledge to make it better, and they should do so.”

Dr. Atul Grover, executive vice president at the Association of American Medical Colleges, said that while teaching hospitals as a group fared better than last year, “we are still disproportionately affected.”

There were 336 hospitals that lost money a year ago but were spared this time, the analysis showed. They include Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa., Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah, and the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor.

Medicare penalized 425 hospitals that it also had punished last year. For all the penalized hospitals, the reductions will retroactively apply to Medicare payments from the beginning of the federal fiscal year in October and through the end of September 2018. Medicare will cut by 1 percent its payments for each patient’s stay as well as the amount of money hospitals get to teach medical residents and to care for low-income people. The total amount for each hospital depends on how much they end up billing Medicare.

The factors considered in the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program include rates of infections from hysterectomies, colon surgeries, urinary tract catheters and central line tubes inserted into veins. It also encompasses rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, and Clostridium difficile, known as C-diff. Medicare also takes into account the frequency of 10 types of in-hospital injuries, including bed sores, hip fractures, blood clots, sepsis and post-surgical wound ruptures. Together, these kinds of potentially avoidable events are known as hospital-acquired conditions, or HACs.

Some hospitals have been targeting the infections that Medicare not only penalizes but also publicizes on its Hospital Compare website. UCSF, for instance, said it has been focused on reducing surgical site infections and C-diff cases. “We remain committed to continually decreasing infection rates to provide the highest level of care for our patients,” UCSF said in a statement.

While the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services had tweaked its methods for assessing payments, the hospital industry remained displeased with the core design of the penalty. Congress decreed that Medicare penalize the worst-performing quarter of general hospitals each year, guaranteeing that more than about 750 hospitals lose money every year even if they had improved their safety records.

In some cases, the difference between penalized hospitals and those that escaped punishment was negligible, said Nancy Foster, vice president for quality and patient safety at the American Hospital Association. “It’s a ‘HACidental’ payment policy,” she said. “It’s frustrating that you know that many hospitals end up getting a significant penalty when their performance is not different from other hospitals.”

Several types of hospitals are excluded from being considered for penalties. They include hospitals that treat psychiatric patients, veterans or children. Also exempted are hospitals with the “critical access” designation for being the only provider in an area. Maryland hospitals are excluded from the program because Medicare has a separate method of paying them.

 

How GOP tax legislation would affect health policy

December 1, 2017by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged ,

By JULIE ROVNER

Kaiser Health News

Having failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Congress is now working on a tax overhaul. But it turns out the tax bills in the House and Senate also aim to reshape health care.

Here are five big ways the tax bill could affect health policy:

1. Repeal the requirement for most people to have health insurance or pay a tax penalty.

Republicans tried and failed to end the so-called individual mandate this year when they attempted to advance their health overhaul legislation. Now the idea is back, at least in the Senate’s version of the tax bill. The measure would not technically remove the requirement for people to have insurance, but it would eliminate the fine people would face if they choose to remain uninsured.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that dropping the requirement would result in 13 million fewer people having insurance over 10 years.

It also estimates that premiums would rise 10 percent more per year than they would without this change. That is because healthier people would be most likely to drop insurance in the absence of a fine, so insurers would have to raise premiums to compensate for a sicker group of customers. Those consumers, in turn, would be left with fewer affordable choices, according to the CBO.

State insurance officials are concerned that insurers will drop out of the individual market entirely if there is no requirement for healthy people to sign up, but they still have to sell to people who know they will need medical care.

Ironically, the states most likely to see this kind of insurance-market disruption are those that are reliably Republican. An analysis by the Los Angeles Times suggested that the states with the fewest insurers and the highest premiums — including Alaska, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, and Wyoming — would be the ones left with either no coverage options or options too expensive for most consumers in the individual market.

2. Repeal the medical-expense deduction.

The House-passed tax bill, although not the Senate’s, would eliminate taxpayers’ ability to deduct medical expenses that exceed 10 percent of their adjusted gross income.

The medical expense deduction is not widely used — just under 9 million tax filers took it on their 2015 tax returns, according to the Internal Revenue Service. But those who do use it generally have very high medical expenses, often for a disabled child, a serious chronic illness or expensive long-term care not covered by health insurance.

Among those most vehemently against getting rid of the deduction is the senior advocacy group AARP. Eliminating the deduction, the group said in a statement, “amounts to a health tax on millions of Americans with high medical costs — especially middle income seniors.”

3. Trigger major cuts to the Medicare program.

The tax bills include no specific Medicare changes, but budget analysts point out that passing it in its current form would trigger another law to kick in. That measure requires cuts to federal programs if the federal budget deficit is increased.

Because the tax bills in both the House and Senate would add an additional $1.5 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, both would result in automatic cuts under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, known as PAYGO. According to the CBO, if Congress passes the tax bill and does not waive the PAYGO law, federal officials “would be required to issue a sequestration order within 15 days of the end of the session of Congress to reduce spending in fiscal year 2018 by the resultant total of $136 billion.”

Cuts to Medicare are limited under the PAYGO law, so the Medicare reduction would be limited to 4 percent of program spending, which is roughly $25 billion of that total. Cuts of a similar size would be required in future years. Most of that would likely come from payments to providers.

4. Change tax treatment for graduate students and those paying back student loans.

The House bill, though not the Senate’s, would for the first time require graduate students to pay tax on the value of tuition that universities do not require them to pay.

Currently, graduate students in many fields, including science, often are paid a small stipend for teaching while they pursue advanced degrees. Many are technically charged tuition, but it is “waived” as long as they are working for the university.

The House tax bill would eliminate that waiver and require them to pay taxes on the full value of the tuition they don’t have to pay, which would result in many students with fairly low incomes seeing very large tax bills.

At the same time, the House tax bill would eliminate the deduction for interest paid on student loans. This would disproportionately affect young doctors.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 75 percent of the medical school class of 2017 graduated with student loan debt, with nearly half owing $200,000 or more.

5. Change or eliminate the tax credit that encourages pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for rare diseases.

Congress created the so-called Orphan Drug Credit in 1983, as part of a package of incentives intended to entice drugmakers to study and develop drugs to treat rare diseases, defined as those affecting fewer than 200,000 people. With such a small potential market, it does not otherwise make financial sense for the companies to spend the millions of dollars necessary to develop treatments for such ailments.
To date, about 500 drugs have come to market using the incentives, although in some cases drugmakers have manipulated the credit for extra financial gain.

The House tax bill would eliminate the tax credit; the Senate bill would scale it back. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee, is one of the original sponsors of the orphan drug law.

The drug industry has been relatively quiet about the potential loss of the credit, but the National Organization for Rare Disorders called the change “wholly unacceptable” and said it “would directly result in 33 percent fewer orphan drugs coming to market.“

CMS expanding program to help rural hospitals

November 27, 2017by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , ,

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has announced that it is adding 13 more hospitals to its Rural Community Hospital  program, joining 17 other participating hospitals. The pilot program reimburses hospitals for the actual cost of inpatient care rather than the standard Medicare rate, which can be as low as 80 percent of real costs.

HealthcareDive reports that program requires that the participating hospitals have fewer than 51 acute-care beds, provide 24-hour emergency services and not be considered a critical-access institution.

The news service notes: “Rural hospitals have been especially hit hard in recent years because of dwindling reimbursements. Since 2010, 80 rural hospitals have closed and 673 are at risk of closing — 210 of which are at “extreme risk,” according to iVantage Health Analytics.

“In addition to lower reimbursements, patient admissions are also down as more patient care shifts to outpatient settings. Plus, President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2018 budget proposal calls for $627 billion cuts from Medicaid over a decade. That could serve as a potential death knell for rural

Still, “{S}ome rural facilities are actually prospering through shifting to value-based care and aligning themselves with quality-driven, cost-conscious trends in healthcare.’’

To read more, please hit this link.

More states rescinding Medicaid ‘retroactive eligibility’

November 14, 2017by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , , , , , , , ,

By MICHELLE ANDREWS

For Kaiser Health News

If you’re poor, uninsured and fall seriously ill, in most states if you qualify for Medicaid — but weren’t enrolled at the time — the program will pay your medical bills going back three months. It protects hospitals, too, from having to absorb the costs of caring for these patients.

But a growing number of states are rescinding this benefit known as “retroactive eligibility.” On Nov. 1, Iowa joined three states that have eliminated retroactive coverage for some groups of Medicaid patients since the Affordable Care Act passed. Each state had to secure approval by the federal government.

Retroactive eligibility has been a feature of Medicaid for decades, reflecting the program’s emphasis on providing a safety net for poor, disabled and other vulnerable people. In contrast to private insurance, determining Medicaid eligibility can be complex and the application process daunting, advocates say. A patient’s medical condition also may keep families from applying promptly for coverage.

All four states — Arkansas, Indiana and New Hampshire, in addition to Iowa — have expanded Medicaid under the health law, which allowed states to include adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $16,000 for one person. So, in theory, most adults are required to have insurance under the ACA. In practice, each state still has a significant number of uninsured, ranging from 5 to 8 percent of the population.

The retroactive coverage “can compensate for the sorts of errors and lapses that can so easily occur on the part of both the applicant and the government bureaucracy” that delay applications, said Gordon Bonnyman, staff attorney at the Tennessee Justice Center, a public interest law firm that represents low-income and uninsured residents.

State and federal officials say eliminating the retroactive coverage helps encourage people to sign up for and maintain coverage when they’re healthy rather than waiting until they’re sick to enroll. It also fits into federal officials’ efforts to make Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health care for low-income adults and children, more like private insurance.

But consumer advocates and health care providers say the shift will saddle patients with hefty medical bills and leave hospitals to absorb more uncompensated care when patients can’t pay. Some worry this could be the start of a trend.

In Iowa, the change applies to just about anyone coming into Medicaid — except for pregnant women and children under age 1. The change will affect up to 40,000 residents annually and save the program more than $36 million a year.

“We’re making it a lot more likely that Medicaid-eligible members are going to incur significant medical debt,” said Mary Nelle Trefz, health policy associate at the Child & Family Policy Center, in Des Moines, whose organization opposed the change.

When someone has a traumatic health event, the initial focus is to get them stabilized, not figure out how to pay for it, said MaryBeth Musumeci, associate director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Patients may neglect to apply immediately for Medicaid, leaving them financially responsible for days or months of care they received before they got in their application, even though they may have been eligible for Medicaid all along.

That’s not the only issue, advocates say. Unlike the commercial insurance market where re-enrollment through someone’s employer is routine, Medicaid requires that beneficiaries’ eligibility be reassesed every year.

“People fall through the cracks,” said Andrea Callow, associate director of Medicaid initiatives at Families USA, a consumer advocacy group.

In addition, complications can arise for people who might need Medicaid coverage for long-term care services. “The criteria are complicated. For a layperson to find those criteria and figure out if they’re eligible” is challenging and they may need extra time, said Musumeci. Once patients have secured coverage, they may already have accrued hefty expenses.

Maybe so, but some people argue that a 90-day retroactive eligibility guarantee is counterproductive.

“We’re trying to get people to behave more responsibly, not less responsibly,” said Gail Wilensky, an economist who oversaw the Medicaid and Medicare programs in the early 1990s under President George H.W. Bush. “That is not the signal you’re sending” with three months of retroactive eligibility. A 30-day time frame is more reasonable, Wilensky said.

In contrast to Iowa, the waivers in Arkansas, Indiana and New Hamsphire generally apply only to adults who gained coverage under the law’s Medicaid expansion. (Indiana’s waiver also applies to other groups.)

Kentucky has a request pending that, like Iowa, would eliminate retroactive Medicaid eligibility except for pregnant women and children under 1, according to KFF.

Under federal law, officials can waive some Medicaid coverage rules to give states flexibility to experiment with different approaches to providing services. And retroactive eligibility waivers in Medicaid are hardly new. A few states like Tennessee have had them in place for years. Tennessee officials eliminated retroactive eligibility for all Medicaid beneficiaries in 1994 when the state significantly expanded coverage under TennCare, as Medicaid is known there. At the time, the state even allowed uninsured people to buy into the program who wouldn’t otherwise qualify based on income, said Bonnyman.

“There was no reason for anybody to be uninsured except undocumented immigrants,” said Bonnyman. “It didn’t seem to have the potential for harm.”

But state officials revamped that program after serious financial problems. Eligibility for TennCare has become more restrictive again.

Other states that waived retroactive coverage for at least some Medicaid groups include Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts and Utah, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Bonnyman said his group frequently works with Medicaid beneficiaries who have medical bills they can’t afford that accumulated during the months before they applied for Medicaid.

“If you’re a moderate- to low-income working family, one or two days in the hospital is enough to ruin you financially,” he said.

 

Nomination of Azar to run HHS is generally lauded

November 14, 2017by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , , ,

 

Despite his close past ties with the pharmaceutical industry, a  wide range of hospital executives and healthcare trade groups have come out in support of Alex Azar to be the next secretary of health and human services.

Mr. Azar, who ran Eli Lilly’s U.S. operations for five years until he stepped down from the position last January, was deputy secretary of HHS in  the George W. Bush administration.  Healthcare-sector officials generally lauded his mix of work experience in  the public and private sectors, and his understanding of the sprawling inner workings of HHS.

But some in Congress weren’t happy. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said:

“We need an HHS secretary who is willing to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and lower prescription drug prices not one who has financially benefited from this greed. I will vigorously oppose this nomination.”

Susan DeVore, CEO of Premier, an alliance of some 3,900 U.S. hospitals and health systems and about 150,000 other providers and organizations, told FierceHealthcare: “We know from that work he understands the need to move away from the perverse incentives in the Medicare fee-for-service payment system and to do so in a fashion that incents high-quality care. He also appreciates the need to have access to healthcare data and interoperability of health information systems.”

To read more, please hit this link.

 

 

Trump administration challenges consensus on how to curb healthcare costs

November 13, 2017by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged

The New York Times reports:

“For several decades, a consensus has grown that reining in the United States’ $3.2 trillion annual medical bill begins with changing the way doctors are paid: Instead of compensating them for every appointment, service and procedure, they should be paid based on the quality of their care.

“The Obama administration used the authority of the Affordable Care Act to aggressively advance this idea, but many doctors chafed at the scope and speed of its experiments to change the way Medicare pays for everything from primary care to cancer treatment. Now, the Trump administration is siding with doctors — making a series of regulatory changes that slow or shrink some of these initiatives and let many doctors delay adopting the new system.

“The efforts to chip away at mandatory payment programs have attracted far less attention than attempts by President Trump and congressional Republicans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, but they have the potential to affect far more people, because private insurers tend to follow what Medicare does. That in turn affects the country’s ability to deal with soaring healthcare costs that have pushed up insurance premiums and deductibles.”

To read the entire Times piece, please hit this link.

CMS calls pilot program to cut readmissions a success

October 26, 2017by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged ,

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says that experiment seeking to cut  avoidable hospitalizations of elderly nursing-home residents has worked well,  generating nearly $50 million in savings. The three-year pilot program, called the Initiative to Reduce Avoidable Hospitalizations among Nursing Facility Residents, achieved a 17 percent relative reduction in potentially avoidable hospitalizations in participating facilities. CMS reported.

“These findings provide persuasive evidence of the initiative’s effectiveness in reducing hospital inpatient admissions, ED visits and hospitalization-related Medicare expenditures,” its  report said.

Modern Healthcare reported that under the model, “third-party organizations known as enhanced care and coordination providers, or ECCPs, hired nurses to provide education and clinical support to nursing home staff and help keep residents out of the hospital. All in all, 143 nursing homes in seven states as well as health systems, universities and consultants participated in the program, which ran from 2012 to 2016.”

“Health systems that participated in the experiment as ECCPs praised the initiative, even though it aimed to reduce inpatient traffic, which could affect their bottom line. The providers acknowledged that it can be better to keep patients in surroundings they know.”

“The experiment could lead to a sea change in how nursing homes care for patients, where the facilities catch ailments early and address them in-house rather than sending residents to the hospital, according to Tim Johnson, executive director of the Greater New York Hospital Association Foundation, which served as the ECCP for New York.”

“Most clinicians have been trained to believe that the hospital is the best place for anyone with an acute change of condition,” Mr.. Johnson told Modern Healthcare. “This belief can result in what turn out to be avoidable hospitalizations.”

“Initiative participants have moved on to the second phase of the model, which pays nursing homes at Medicare rates to treat patients with one of six specific ailments in their facilities and out of hospitals.

“The six conditions—pneumonia, dehydration, congestive heart failure, urinary tract infections, skin ulcers and asthma—are linked to approximately 80% of potentially avoidable hospitalizations among long term care facility residents, according to the CMS.”

To read more, please hit this link.

Page 2 of 29123...Last

Contact Info

info@cmg625.com

(617) 230-4965

Wellesley, Mass