News Clips
EHR Intelligence: (7/13) – Primary care teams at two Veterans Health Administration (VHA) medical centers found an event notification EHR integration for admissions and discharges improves care coordination, according to a new study published online in JAMIA.
MedCity News: (7/13) – Value based care shifts the emphasis of care to preventative and proactive measures. However, without the proper tools to collect and analyze patient and claims data – including social determinants of health (SDOH) such as a patient’s socioeconomic status, housing security and access to food, medications and transportation – it is extremely difficult for providers to be proactive. For value based care to be effective, it must be accompanied by advanced analytics to be able to make the connections between physical conditions and behavioral health components and to be able to view trends across communities to improve population health outcomes.
Fierce Healthcare: (7/12) – Some provider groups believe that the President’s Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy is misplaced and will add bureaucratic red tape to merger agreements. For example, the American Hospital Association stated that mergers with larger systems can help rural communities as it gives such providers “scale and resources needed to improve quality and decrease costs.”
Modern Healthcare: (7/8) – Hospital buyers have fewer independent hospitals to target, and have turned to similarly sized systems to create regional hubs. The total revenue among hospitals that announced deals in the first half of 2021 was $17.2 billion, which was the second-highest tally since 2015, Kaufman Hall data show. However, the number of transactions fell, signaling that larger health systems aim to join forces. The average size of the smaller hospital involved in the transaction was $638.6 million, which doubled the trailing five-year average.
Health Affairs: (7/8) – Accumulated pricing distortions in physician payments that favor proceduralists have led a skewed physician workforce. Select specialties have incomes that are multiples of their peers. As a result, workforce shortages have emerged in primary care and other similar cognitively focused specialties such as infectious diseases, endocrinology, and neurology. CMS has begun to address these distortions, but the agency’s efforts may inadvertently worsen relative compensation for some cognitively focused practitioners.
Forbes: (7/7) – In declining to hear the hospital industry’s challenge to Medicare’s new site-neutral payment policy, the Supreme Court avoided blocking a major step toward a true value-based healthcare system. For the first time – and despite the strenuous resistance from provider and hospital groups, the national conversation is finally focused on what kind of care a patient receives, not simply who pays for it or where it takes place.
Fierce Healthcare: (7/7) – Hospitals “routinely” charge uninsured and cash-paying patients rates higher than those negotiated by payers, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report reviewing hospitals’ newly available price transparency data. Among a sample of 1,550 hospitals, 21% billed these patients at the highest rates for the majority of the healthcare services included in the WSJ’s analysis. For 11% of the hospital sample, the cash rates for every reviewed service were higher than insurers’ rates or were tied for the highest rate.
MedPage Today: (7/6) – Medicare ACOs face multiple changes and challenges. Challenges include proposed changes to collection of quality data; methodology issues such as the “rural glitch” that disadvantage one type of ACOs over another; model-specific decisions including the decision not to extend the Next Generation ACO model beyond the end of 2021; and lack of clarity on the general path for streamlining CMMI models per recent MedPAC recommendation.
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