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The New Imperative Of Patient Engagement For Hospitals And Health Systems
Currently, most hospitals and health systems focus on patient engagement because of their mission to deliver patient-centric care. These efforts are pursued despite the neutral or even negative economic consequences to these organizations, which operate within the fragmented, fee-for-service payment system. For example, care coordination attendant to patient engagement efforts will, at times, reduce demand for services and, thereby, reduce fee-for-service payments to providers.
As public and private sector health care purchasers shift payment models towards value and as demographic changes result in more chronically ill patients entering the health care system, patient engagement efforts will become increasingly important to the financial sustainability and clinical success of these hospitals and health systems.
New patient engagement efforts shift focus from the inpatient core of hospitals to ambulatory care settings and to the integration of care into the homes and communities of patients. To succeed at these efforts, organizations must build longitudinal partnerships with patients to drive ongoing management of chronic conditions and utilization of preventive care services to drive long-term quality and cost outcomes.
See more on healthaffairs.org
Akerman’s Health Law Rx Blog
I am pleased to announce my firm’s new health law blog, Health Law Rx Blog.
Akerman’s Health Law Rx Blog provides timely updates on the latest health law issues, keeping the firm’s clients, friends, and readers up to date on pertinent legal developments. Akerman attorneys regularly update the blog with changes in the law and other relevant news. As this is meant to be an interactive site, your comments and contributions are appreciated. I am one of the contributors, so I hope you will visit the blog often and participate in any discussions that interest you. I plan to shadow post articles from the blog that I think you will find interesting.
Content on Akerman’s Health Law Rx Blog is intended to inform you about legal developments, including recent decisions of various courts and administrative bodies. It should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion, and you should not act upon the information without seeking the advice of legal counsel.
With more than 550 lawyers and government affairs professionals and a network of 19 offices, Akerman is ranked among the top 100 law firms in the U.S. by The National Law Journal NLJ 250 (2012). The firm’s Healthcare Practice Group includes over twenty attorneys and professionals representing health systems, physicians, health insurers, and other clients in all aspects of healthcare law across Florida and throughout the United States.
Immigration reform could add millions of people under Obama health law – The Hill’s Healthwatch
Comprehensive immigration reform could make millions of people suddenly eligible for assistance under President Obama’s healthcare law, assuming a final deal paves the way for undocumented immigrants to receive papers.
Illegal aliens are now prohibited from purchasing coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges, which will launch next year.
They are also ineligible for Medicaid under most circumstances, making the law’s expansion of the program fruitless for people without documents.
The landscape could change completely if Hispanic lawmakers get their wish — an overhaul of U. S. immigration policy that includes a path to legalization.
Helping people get and stay healthy, illegal immigrants or not, has to be cheaper in the long run. Sort of like Stephen Covey’s “sharpening the saw” — it takes time and resources to sharpen the saw, but once done, the work goes easier.
See on thehill.com
Is Concierge Medicine Finally Ready for Takeoff? – HealthLeaders Media
For years observers have been predicting the impending migration of physicians into direct pay or concierge medicine, where no longer will they have to accept low Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements or haggle with private payers.
Has that time finally arrived?
A recent survey of more than 13,500 physicians found that 6.8% of them would “embrace” direct pay or concierge medicine within the next three years. That includes 9.6% of practice owners, 7.7% of primary care physicians, and 6.4% of specialists, according to the survey conducted by physician recruiters Merritt Hawkins for The Physicians Foundation.
See on www.healthleadersmedia.com
Physicians have limited choices in front of them for how they will provide care in the future (and the future is now) — (1) maintain the status quo, (2) combine, merge, or consolidate with, or sell to, with other physicians, (3) sell to, or affiliate with, hospital systems or managed care companies, or (4) become independent of other physicians, of hospitals, and of managed care companies by doing concierge medicine.
Telehealth to Expand in Rural Communities with FCC $400 Million Fund
The FCC has announced $400 million will be made available through a healthcare connect fund to create and expand telehealth networks and services.
See on www.hitechanswers.net
Mining Electronic Records for Revealing Health Data
The New York Times reported last week (www.nytimes.com) another value of electronic health records — to supplement or even replace clinical research to improve patient care:
Over the past decade, nudged by new federal regulations, hospitals and medical offices around the country have been converting scribbled doctors’ notes to electronic records. Although the chief goal has been to improve efficiency and cut costs, a disappointing report published last week by the RAND Corp. found that electronic health records actually may be raising the nation’s medical bills.
But the report neglected one powerful incentive for the switch to electronic records: the resulting databases of clinical information are gold mines for medical research. The monitoring and analysis of electronic medical records, some scientists say, have the potential to make every patient a participant in a vast, ongoing clinical trial, pinpointing treatments and side effects that would be hard to discern from anecdotal case reports or expensive clinical trials.
Beth Kassab: Patients lose when hospitals take over doctors
When a big hospital chain buys an independent doctor’s office, we often hear the move will “enhance care”, “integrate care” or “improve health-care efficiency.”
Spare us the euphemisms.
Patients are the losers in these deals.
We pay higher costs. We get fewer choices because doctors are pressured to refer patients only to providers who also work for the hospital. And, because these acquisitions are so common today, an independent doctor’s office is becoming as quaint as the house call.
Unfortunately, this is the entire article and is much too short to discuss a topic full of so many nuances. Tough issues need far more analysis and thought than this. The question to study is, if the goal of physician practice acquisitions is integration of healthcare to enhance and improve the patient experience while reducing costs, then where are the disconnects? Why are hospitals and physicians failing (assuming this “reporter” is correct in her bottom line conclusion)?
See on articles.orlandosentinel.com
Preventive Services, Including Contraceptive Coverage, Under the Health Care Law
All Women Should Have Access to Preventive Health Services, including Contraception, Without a Co-Pay, and Have It No Matter Where They Work
The health care law makes preventive care more accessible and affordable to millions of Americans by making certain preventive services, including all FDA-approved contraceptive methods, available without co-payments or other cost sharing requirements. This is especially important to women, who are more likely than men to avoid needed health care, including preventive care, because of cost. This requirement is a huge step forward for women’s health. Over the next few years, as an increasing number of health plans come under the law’s reach, more and more women will have access to a wide range of preventive services without co-payments or deductibles.
See on www.nwlc.org
Primary care doctors growing scarce
Roughly 4 million additional Californians are expected to obtain health insurance by 2014 through the federal health law, an expansion that will likely exacerbate the state’s doctor shortage and could even squeeze primary care access in the Bay area, experts say.
Even without the Affordable Care Act, a worsening doctor shortage had been forecast as the state’s and nation’s population ages and grows, and as a generation of older doctors retires. But by mandating that individuals have insurance and expanding Medicaid, the law will extend coverage to an additional 30 million Americans and place a greater strain on the physician workforce, especially for primary care.
See on www.sfgate.com
7 Big Data Solutions Try To Reshape Healthcare
Skepticism is a two-edged sword. Not enough of it, and an IT manager might find himself duped into investing in software “solutions” that go nowhere. Too much of it, and skepticism can leave an IT department behind as it waits for enough proof to show a particular platform will improve outcomes beyond a reasonable doubt.
Big data analytics is at that tipping point right now in the healthcare industry. Several vendors promise better quality of care and reduced expenditures, but evidence to support those claims is somewhat tentative. Similarly, some critics of the big data movement say healthcare providers need to squeeze all the intelligence they can from small data sets before moving on to larger projects.
In a recent post in The Health Care Blog, for instance, consultants David C. Kibbe, M.D., and Vince Kuraitis argue that instead of succumbing to the allure of big data analytics, providers should focus on using small data better. In other words, concentrate on the clinical data already available in digitized form and use only those health IT tools that are directly applicable to care management.
Big data analytics, on the other hand, attempts to parse mounds of data from many disparate sources to discover patterns that could be useful in problem solving. For example, researchers are employing the big data approach to study genetic and environmental factors in multiple sclerosis to search for personalized treatments.
Some of this research might lead to exciting payoffs down the road, but IT companies are not waiting. As Kibbe and Kuraitis point out, technology firms are touting big data analytics as a must-have for healthcare systems and physician groups that aim to become accountable care organizations or make ACO-like arrangements with payers. As these ACOs and healthcare organizations try to profit under shared-savings or financial risk contracts, these proponents claim, big data can help them crunch the data for quality improvement and cost reductions.
Some providers are already using big data in patient care. According to BusinessWeek, “many [providers] are turning to companies such as Microsoft, SAS, Dell, IBM, and Oracle for their data-mining expertise.” And healthcare analytics is a growth business. Frost & Sullivan projects that half of hospitals will be using advanced analytics software by 2016, compared to 10% today.
Are healthcare providers ready for big data analytics, or should they be content with the more limited data analytics capabilities built into their EHR systems and relational databases to point the way to new policies and procedures?
When asked to weigh in on the big data/small data debate during a recent interview withInformationWeek Healthcare, David Blumenthal, former head of the Office of the National Coordinate of health IT, said, “It’s not an either/or choice. Big data starts with small data. As we have more information on health and disease and the patterns of care … that information will provide useful insights into what works, what doesn’t. What the natural history of disease is. It will enable us to do studies faster and more efficiently … But it’s going to take a while to figure out how to use the data.”
See on www.informationweek.com
Joseph Rugg's Health Law Blog 