Medicare Open Enrollment: To Dis-enroll or Not? Searching For Answers with an AI Assist

by Gregg Anthony Masters, MPH Some of you may have heard about the whining by UnitedHealthcare’s leadership on a recent earnings call which included the required ‘management’s discussion or operating results and market conditions’ analysis. A BIG WHAAAA! Overfunded since inception and having perfected the art of ‘upcoding‘ (i.e,, severity of illness and intensity of …

ACO Digital Assets Available

by Gregg A. Masters, MPH It’s been quite some time that I’ve updated this site though not for a lack of news. Yet some 434 posts later following the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the signature, and against all odds accomplishment of then President Barack Obama, I thought I’d update both subscribers and followers …

CMS Announces 2019 Shared Savings Results

by Gregg A. Masters, MPH Some eight plus years in, ACOs are still earning their ‘shared savings‘ industry ‘sea-legs’. While they remain a central actor of transformation from volume to value birthed by the ACA for both the public (Medicare and Medicaid) and private (commercial health plans) sectors, the results are continuing to build. The …

Need Another Acronym? Think ‘CHART’ Courtesy of ‘CMMI’

by Gregg A. Masters, MPH In a sea of relentless ‘acronym soup’ that peppers the landscape and too often separates us from the constituency we ostensibly serve (patients) via added layers of dubious complexity to the dysfunctional U.S. healthcare delivery and financing ecosystem, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) has added the ‘Community …

National Association of ACOs et al Weigh in on the ‘Value in Health Care Act of 2020’

by Gregg A. Masters, MPH Article discovered via the National Association of ACOs (NAACOs) a ‘501 (c) 6 non-profit organization that allows Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) to work together to increase quality of care, lower costs and improve the health of their communities’ . NAACOs et al weigh in on the Value in Health Care …

Will Health Systems Recover from the COVID-19 Pandemic?

by Gregg A. Masters, MPH and Fred Goldstein, MS* In the still unfolding operating ‘new normal‘ wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic the path forward presents perhaps the career challenge of a lifetime to both seasoned and emerging U.S. healthcare leadership. No doubt, in health system c-suites across the nation the strategic question is and will …

Surprise Medical Bills In Context: Is Tech the Solution?

By Fred Goldstein, MS and Gregg Masters, MPH It’s Q1 2020 and everyone is now rightfully preoccupied with the recent World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of the COVID-19 as a global pandemic. Congress, the White House, National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and local state and county health departments (collectively …

Population Health the 20th Anniversary Edition

By Fred Goldstein, MS, Alexandria Skoufalos, EdD and Gregg Masters, MPH Can you believe it’s been 20 years since the first Population Health Colloquium? Back then, we were just a few months into a new century. Maybe some of you even remember the concern over whether Y2K (a programming shortcut that used two digits to …

Health Care ‘Texas Style’: A Model for the Nation?

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH This a re-post of an article written in October 2009 following Atul Gawande‘s article in the New Yorker on the ‘cost conundrum‘ which launched his presence and eventual celebrity on the national stage. Gawande was calling attention to the regional variations (small area analysis) in the Medicare spend and associated …

ACOs and Value Based Care: The Best of Times Or The Worst of Times? It Depends!

By Fred Goldstein, MS and Gregg Masters, MPH This past year has seen major changes to the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) that launched the huge growth in Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) a principal workhorse in the transformational copy of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  It seems that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services …