Accountable care organizations (ACOs) aim to improve patient care by managing their conditions and maintaining access to affordable care. To do so, ACOs amass data about patient health and spending, and there’s a potentially positive side effect: ACOs can serve as watchdogs to guard against wasteful and fraudulent spending in health care. That has happened over…
On Tuesday afternoon at the MGMA Leaders Conference 2025 in Orlando, Florida, an expert panel, moderated by Shane Jackson, MBA, president of Jackson Healthcare, wrestled with deceptively simple question: Is medicine still a calling? The question was first posed in a joint report published by the two organizations earlier this year. The panel was comprised of Tony Stajduhar, president…
Care coordination by definition is a strategy that is focused on bringing together the multiple parties of a patient’s care team to knock down barriers of communication in order to enable the best outcomes for your patients. However, by doing so, your healthcare organization stands to see significant savings on your bottom line. Here are a few…
According to a recent Harvard report, physician burnout is “a public health crisis that urgently demands action.” Half of all doctors report troubling symptoms: depression, exhaustion, dissatisfaction and a sense of failure. These physicians are twice as likely to commit a serious medical error, research finds. Experts predict that if left unaddressed, burnout will further erode the mental health of…
In a recent post, we addressed the many types of population health initiatives and some guidelines for creating the most benefit. Now let’s take a closer look at one of those guidelines: integrating population health into regular or routine care of patients—specifically, with greater involvement and communication by the patients’ physicians. ACOs and their participating…
What gets measured gets attention. Coverage of physician burnout is bringing awareness of increasing rates of physician suicide and the systemic issues that contribute to this problem. Physicians are unhappy with their loss of autonomy, billing complexity and electronic health record (EHR) burdens that interfere with their day-to-day work with patients. Programs focused only on…
Dive Brief: The growth of accountable care organizations is cutting physician work hours as well as the likelihood of doctors being self-employed, according to a new JAMA report. The study of nearly 50,000 doctors found a 10% increase in ACO enrollment in a hospital referral region is connected with 0.82 fewer work hours per week…
Physicians on the front lines of health care today are sometimes described as going to battle. It’s an apt metaphor. Physicians, like combat soldiers, often face a profound and unrecognized threat to their well-being: moral injury. Moral injury is frequently mischaracterized. In combat veterans it is diagnosed as post-traumatic stress; among physicians it’s portrayed as…