The Braintrust of Accountable Care aka AMGA Descends Upon San Diego: Who Knew!

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH In a chance conversation with my friend, fellow ‘healthtweep’ and patient empowerment co-conspirator Dave DeBronkart, aka @epatientdave, I learned yesterday that AMGA aka @theAMGA was holding their annual meeting in San Diego. This is perhaps the largest concentration of ‘doers’ in the accountable care movement. Many participated in the landmark …

L. Gordon Moore, MD on the Role of Primary Care in Accountable Care

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH In a week when Blue Shield of California served Monarch Healthcare as proxy for Optum aka United HealthGroup a $10.5 million damages demand for arbitration enumerating a number of contractual breaches, the following headline was also in the news (for full article, click here): Doctors decry Kern Medical Center cut of …

ACO’s: It Ain’t Just About ‘Health IT’

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH We’ve been somewhat on an unexpected hiatus since HiMSS 2012 in Las Vegas, but are now back with intent to assimilate and interpret the subtext or tea leaves driving the transformation towards accountable care. I will leave that update to another blog post, but for now, a quick comment on …

Wag The Dog: Will Subacute Providers Drive Upstream Innovation?

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH One of the more interesting and perhaps developing trends to watch in fledgling accountable care enterprises or ACOs is the blueprint adopted for their chosen pathways towards integration (clinical, economic or legal). Since all healthcare is [hyper] local and, once you’ve seen an ACO, you’ve seen one ACO its vital …

AHIP: It’s Not Cost Shifting, We’re ‘Unleashing Patients’

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Seriously folks, you’ve got to hand it to the PR firm supplying the American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) with the brilliant, timely and thematically near argument resistant messaging copy just revealed via a .PPT preso titled ‘Health Care Innovation in the Context of Rising Health Care Costs‘ and delivered by Karen Ignani, …

Rebuttal and Comment to ‘NYT Op Ed: Emanuel Editorial is Irresponsible and Naive’

By Vince Kuraitis Zeke Emanuel’s editorial in the New York Times — The End of Health Insurance Companies — really got my blood boiling. It’s irresponsible and naive. Former Obama advisor Emanuel “predicts”: By 2020, the American health insurance industry will be extinct. Insurance companies will be replaced by accountable care organizations — groups of …

Monarch HealthCare: Leveraging Expertise in Population Health Management

A Case Study in the Brookings–Dartmouth ACO Pilot Program This case study examines the progress that Monarch HealthCare, a physician led independent practice association in Orange County, California, has made in its efforts to become accountable for the quality and overall cost of care for its patient population. Monarch HealthCare is one of the provider …

Miss Commonwealth Fund Webinar on ACOs?

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH If you did, do yourself a favor and watch the recorded broadcast ‘ACO Formation: Leading the Transition to New Models of Care‘, here. My net take away from the event is total optimism that the clearer thinking brain trust who understand, ‘failure is not an option’ for a healthcare conundrum …

Tweet Transcript of Commonwealth Fund ACO Formation: Leading the Transition to New Models of Care

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH TweetReach for #ACOchat – Demonstrating the ‘digital footprint’ of a real time healthcare focused social media ‘conversation…. Reached 20,760 peeps via the last 50 tweets….Exposure: 180,892 Impressions Tweet Types Each pie slice shows how many people saw how many tweets and the impressions generated via the 8 Tweeps participating below…. for real time …

Platforms, Accountable Care and Results

By Vince Kuraitis What do Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have in common? Eric Schmidt, Chairman (and former President) of Google, coined the term “Gang of Four” in referring to the similar platform/application technical architecture and business models of these companies. In the case of Apple iOS and Google Android OS, much of the value is created by …