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Lowering Costs and Readmission Rates Through a Meal Delivery Program
June 12th 2018As health systems nationwide try to address social determinants of health, the Maine Medical Center and the Southern Maine Agency on Aging formed a partnership to provide appropriate meals to Medicare patients transitioning from the hospital, reducing costs and readmission rates.
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Addressing Financial Toxicity With Navigators and Better Conversations Around Decision Making
June 5th 2018Financial toxicity impacts a lot more than a patient's finances—it leads to nonadherence and poorer health outcomes. Financial navigators are increasingly being used to be proactive about addressing high healthcare costs and the resulting financial toxicity.
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Workplace Wellness Results and Privacy Concerns: Interviews With Al Lewis and Dr Deborah Peel
May 29th 2018How confident is Al Lewis, JD, that workplace wellness programs don't work? Confident enougn to put his own money on the line. In this podcast, Lewis discusses the results seen in traditional wellness programs, and Deborah Peel, MD, outlines privacy concerns.
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What Is and Is Not in Trump's Drug Pricing Plan: An Interview With Dr Michael Chernew
May 22nd 2018American Patients First, President Donald Trump's blueprint to bring down the cost of drug pricing is the result of a campaign promise to drive down out-of-pocket costs for consumers. Those who helped craft the proposal say it represents real reform. However, critics say it goes too easy on the pharmaceutical industry.
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The Scope of Physician Burnout: Symptoms, Impacts, and Efforts to Address It
May 16th 2018A growing pile of evidence points toward a growing issue of physician burnout. Several studies have indicated that nearly half of physicians feel burned out, and more than two-thirds have reported physician burnout as a "serious" or "moderate" issue within their organization.
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Drs Barnett and McWilliams Discuss Whether Specialty Care Leakage Matters for ACOs
May 10th 2018Accountable care organizations are incentivized to reduce spending and improve quality of care. One way they have tried to achieve these goals is by establishing control over a patient’s full continuum of care by minimizing the care patients receive from other providers outside of the ACO, including specialists.
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The Challenge of Hospital Observation Status: A Discussion With Andria Jacobs
May 8th 2018Patients who get care at a hospital often receive bills that are bigger than they were expecting. In the case of Medicare, this can happen when a beneficiary receives care at a hospital for several days but was never formally admitted to the hospital.
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Low-Value Services: Their Impact and Challenges With Addressing Them
May 2nd 2018Jason Buxbaum, MHSA, project manager, V-BID Health; and Robert Dubois, MD, PhD, chief scientific officer, National Pharmaceutical Council, discuss low-value services, their financial impact, what states are doing to address them, and challenges with addressing them.
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Locations, Types, and Characteristics of Data Breaches in Hospitals
April 5th 2018As healthcare data breaches continue to rise, a team of researchers identified locations in hospitals where data are breached, the types of breaches that occur most often at hospitals, and hospital characteristics that may predict large data breaches that affect 500 or more patients.
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Addressing Low-Value Care and a Better Benefit Design at the V-BID Summit
March 29th 2018As the country searches a new way to address cost of care, value-based insurance design (VBID), is gaining traction as one way of encouraging the use of high-value services and discouraging the use of low-value services.
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Addressing Health Through Housing Solutions
March 21st 2018As the US healthcare system searches for a way to address the poor health and high healthcare costs of American, one concept has risen to the top and received a lot of attention: social determinants of health. In this podcast, we focus on the issue of housing, and how communities are working to get people into housing so their health can improve.
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A Better Way to Understand Postdischarge Care
March 11th 2018As hospitals are increasingly held accountable for what happens outside the hospital walls, they need access to better claims data. In a recent study published in the November issue of The American Journal of Managed Care®, researchers with the Michigan Value Collaborative found that it is possible to derive episode-level utilization from claims data and it provides a level of postdischarge care precision that is superior to medical records that hospitals have access to.
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