Value-Based Care

At a session during Digestive Disease Week 2017, held in Chicago from May 6-9, speakers discussed the ongoing efforts to define, measure, and improve the quality of care for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

At the ACO & Emerging Healthcare Delivery Coalition®, people from around the country who are successfully creating new ways to deliver value-based care come together to share learnings and best practices for attendees to take back to the office on Monday, explained Clifford Goodman, PhD, moderator at the ACO Coalition spring live meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, and senior vice president and director at the Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research at the Lewin Group.

Panelists on day 1 of the ACO & Emerging Healthcare Delivery Coalition® discussed the challenging work of creating public-private partnerships, and how these initiatives can address issues to improve the health of a population.

When the ACO & Emerging Healthcare Delivery Coalition® meets May 4-5 in Scottsdale, Arizona, attendees will learn the latest on healthcare reform, best practices for cybersecurity, population health strategies, and more.

Will bundled payments be implemented quickly or slowly? Will they be voluntary or mandatory? There's disagreement about what the ongoing movement toward accountable care should look like.

An analysis of Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs) revealed that those with more primary care physicians performed better on preventive care quality measures and infrastructure and financing were also predictive of better performance, explained Mariétou Ouayogodé, PhD, post-doctoral fellow at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

The report finds that being part of an ACO allows clinicians to be rated as a group for a key measure to determine Medicare reimbursement.

A provision in President Donald Trump’s budget proposal would incorporate the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which could represent a threat or an opportunity.

The move away from fee-for-service has driven some health plans to embrace value-based care contracts and accountable care organizations. During a session at the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy Annual Meeting, held March 27-30, 2017, in Denver, Colorado, panelists outlined how the marketplace has evolved.

Healthcare consulting is a growing industry touching each of the stakeholders involved in healthcare, and these consultants are playing an increasingly significant role in the United States healthcare system.

Partnering with local nonprofits with expertise in various areas, such as food support, vocational services, and mental health case management, Hennepin Health has been able to successful manage the health of a complex population, explained Ross Owen, health strategy director of Hennepin County.

Private sector accountable care organization development has been motivated by perceived opportunities to improve quality, efficiency, and population health, and the belief that payment reform is inevitable.

The increased emphasis that the Affordable Care Act and Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs) placed on prevention is important in reducing the high cost of older patients, especially as the baby boomer generation reached retirement age, explained Mariétou Ouayogodé, PhD, post-doctoral fellow at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

On May 4-5, 2017, The American Journal of Managed Care's ACO & Emerging Healthcare Delivery Coalition will head back to Scottsdale, Arizona, to bring together stakeholders from across the industry.

Given that accountable care organizations (ACOs) will be rated on patient experience and wait times for specialist consults are associated with patient satisfaction, ACOs should monitor this process.

Given the current focus on efforts to contain costs, improve the delivery of care, and meet consumer demand, telemedicine is an attractive tool to use for success in these areas.

As healthcare increasingly rewards quality and value in care delivery, Aetna hopes that 75% of its payments will be value-based by 2020, according to Harold L. Paz, MD, MS, executive vice president and chief medical officer at Aetna.

This week, the top news in managed care included President Donald Trump's first address to Congress, which included guiding principles for replacing the Affordable Care Act, a leaked version of the House GOP's own draft for healthcare reform, and a study finds a concerning trend in colorectal cancer rates among young adults.

A recent paper in JAMA Internal Medicine examined the accountable care organization programs in Colorado and Oregon to determine their impacts on spending, access, and utilization.

At the 5th annual Patient-Centered Oncology Care® meeting, stakeholders shared their views on how bundled payments, clinical pathways, and other value-based approaches can be implemented in cancer care while ensuring adequate care quality.

As payment models shift to emphasize patient experience and quality of care, a panel discussion at the 5th annual Patient-Centered Oncology Care® meeting debated whether these efforts had meaningfully improved outcomes for patients.

This article compares how parents of children seeking specialty care perceive National Committee for Quality Assurance—based patient-centered medical home elements in the primary and specialty care settings.

The transition to value-based care has been helpful in getting providers to examine their own performance and find ways to improve quality, said Andrei Gonzales, director of value-based reimbursement initiatives at McKesson Health Solutions.

CMS has been making efforts to reduce administrative burdens for physicians as the healthcare industry moves to value-based care through the implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), said Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Healthy Policy.

Research into the financial performance of Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs) has found that organizations benefit from having prior experience with risk-bearing contracts, but that organizations that had reduced growth in healthcare spending before joining an ACO would find it difficult to improve further and share in savings, according to Marietou Ouayogode, PhD.