Robert Whitcomb

Lee Fleisher, M.D., chief medical officer for the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, discusses CMS’s drive for, in the words of NEJM catalyst, “health-care delivery improvement in quality, safety, high reliability, and equity, and the various levers of its quality measurement agenda.”

Indeed, he says, if we don’t have equity, we don’t have quality.

He tells NEJM: “What we’ve learned from the pandemic is a resilient system. At the lowest, at the baseline level, are our conditions of participation, those minimum standards that we push out to ensure that all health care providers who are covered by Medicare or certified provide that care. We need to rethink how they should include equity, just like we included safety 2 decades ago, that it’s important that governance look at equity. We’ve asked a number of questions in our request for proposals, for information, about how they should change. We then have three levers to improve quality to get to that highest level. One is the payment models, another is the quality improvement activities, but what is really important are those quality measures.”

To read his discussion with Dr. Thomas Lee in NEJM catalyst, please hit this link.

An article in Physicians Practice by Corey Redding, executive director of the Cumberland Accountable Care Organization, in Tennessee, discusses how to choose ACO partners.

He notes:

“To realize strong clinical and financial results with an ACO model, it is critical to choose one that aligns with your practice’s mission, values, and strategic priorities. In addition, you should look for one that is committed to robust communication and support throughout the relationship.”

And:

“A high-performing ACO must have a dedicated board in place whose members support the payer risk-sharing model, have influence in the local healthcare community and are respected by physician and non-physician peers. All providers participating in the ACO must be excited about the model and know their role in making it successful.”

And:

“To accomplish its mission, an ACO needs real-time data from across the care continuum that providers can use to identify patients with care gaps and guide interventions to close those gaps. The more comprehensive the data, the more likely participating providers will have access to a complete picture of the care happening outside their four walls. This requires a platform that can automatically capture data from disparate sources and normalize it for use within different electronic health records (EHRs), so providers can use it in decision-making without having to toggle between systems.”

To read the article, please hit this link.

An article on the site of Harvard’s school of public health discusses the best ways to transition from physician to physician leader. Among the observations:

“‘In order to succeed, physician leaders need enough training to know what questions to ask, what they’ll need from others, and what potential strategies they can use,’ says Mary C. Finlay, MBA, Program Director of Leadership Development for Physicians in Academic Health Centers and Lecturer in the Division of Policy Translation and Leadership Development at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. ‘They also need to understand broader market trends and changes that could impact their ability to grow or develop their division or department.’

“Once they have a grasp on these key areas, leaders can start to conduct analyses and take stock of potential problems or areas for improvement within their department. In order to succeed, physician leaders need enough training to know what questions to ask, what they’ll need from others, and what potential strategies they can use.”

Hit this link to read the article.

A study published in 2019 suggests that hospitals do better in health-care-quality metrics when they’re run by physicians than by nonphysicians, while physician leaders’ financial performance is as high as nonphysicians’.

Hit this link to read about it:

journals.lww.com/hcmrjournal/Abstract/2019/07000/Does_physician_leadership_affect_hospital_quality,.8.aspx