AJMC® Research Roundup: November 2019

Multimodality Cancer Care and Implications for Episode-Based Payments in Cancer

1. Few patients receiving more than 1 treatment modality for colorectal, lung, or breast cancer received all of their care from the same practice. This creates a challenge when seeking to attribute patients to oncology providers in alternative payment models.

Comprehensive Health Management Pharmacist-Delivered Model: Impact on Healthcare Utilization and Costs

2. A program that integrated pharmacists into family medicine clinics to optimize medication use resulted in a relative decrease in emergency department visits and a cost savings of $2.10 to $2.60 for every $1.00 spent on the medication management program.

CKD Quality Improvement Intervention With PCMH Integration: Health Plan Results

3. By using laboratory test results to stratify primary care patients by their risk of chronic kidney disease, an intervention was able to increase kidney testing rates and reduce some types of utilization while lowering selected expenditures.

Medicare Advantage Plan Representatives’ Perspectives on Pay for Success

4. Medicare Advantage plan representatives are interested in learning more about the alternative financing model Pay for Success, which presents an opportunity to target plan members’ social risk factors, but some expressed potential concerns.

Population Health Screenings for the Prevention of Chronic Disease Progression

5. In an employee population, annual health screenings involving laboratory testing can help identify prediabetes before it progresses to diabetes, detect chronic kidney disease before worsening to end-stage kidney disease, and catch colorectal cancer in earlier stages.

To read all of these studies and more, visit AJMC.com.