For ACOs to remain relevant as leaders of Value-Based payment models, they must step up now to generate more cost savings for Medicare patient care. Budget cuts for Medicare are once again under discussion by conservatives as political pressure mounts to lower governmental spending. Meanwhile, CMS is expanding risk in Medicare value-based payment models, moving…
Institutional Special Needs Plans could be the tool nursing homes need to find better clinical and financial success and help the government achieve its goals of reducing costs and improving quality, a trio of researchers and policy advisors argues in the New England Journal of Medicine. But more data is needed to determine whether the…
Disruptive reimbursement and regulatory challenges are top of mind for today’s hospice c-suite executives, who recently sat down with Hospice News to discuss what they see as the largest hurdles to sustainable end-of-life care delivery. Reimbursement pressures and changes among the most significant concerns for today’s hospices, according to Kristen Yntema, president and CEO of…
As physicians in practice become more and more burdened by administrative work, they’re finding that those burdens are impacting their sense of their effectiveness in patient care delivery. As a result, many medical group leaders are seizing the opportunity to implement artificial intelligence tools that their physicians can use. For example, AI can be leveraged…
A new study has found that Medicaid ACOs in Massachusetts were associated with increases in prenatal and postpartum office visits, postpartum depression screenings, and timely postpartum care. Despite recent declines in nationwide maternal mortality, the United States continues to experience a significant maternal health crisis, in part shaped by inequitable access to quality health care…
“How can we advance health equity in cardiovascular care?” asked David Thompson, PhD, professor of nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, on day 2 of the 2024 European Society of Cardiology Congress. To even know where to begin, it’s important to first understand that health equity and health equality are…
Physicians working with value-based payment models are being graded on an average of 57 different quality measures a year, according to a new study. The quality measures were included in commercial and government insurance plans, with Medicare leading the number, with 15.04 quality measures per contract in 2022, according to “Value-Based Contracting in Clinical Care,”…
I was the editor of a healthcare business magazine for 11 years. I was in charge of hiring and firing our editorial staff of reporters, editors and designers. My performance measures for new hires were pretty simple: get to work on time, work hard, do a good job, don’t cause any trouble and leave on…
A research article by a team of researchers has found that the development of accountable care organizations—particularly of the ACOs participating in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) has not in itself advanced the development of work on the social determinants of health (SDOH). That’s the conclusion of an article published in the July issue…
The COVID pandemic that overwhelmed our healthcare industry and laid bare the vulnerability of our systems is relatively well contained today. Now that we’ve moved beyond crisis mode, where is U.S. healthcare headed as a system? My hope is that we will return our attention to the health system’s transition from fee-for-service to value-based care…