Monitoring the birth of an industry
By Vince Kuraitis This post originally appeared at eCare Management Blog. One of the biggest concerns about ACOs has been their potential to enable market consolidation – that by uniting health care providers the ACO gains market clout and ability to charge higher prices. While this is a legitimate concern about ACOs, so far it’s not playing out. …
Continue reading “Feel for the enforcers: Shades of Maytag Repair Man?”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH We hear considerable chatter on both sides of the ACO or ‘AC/e’ for accountable care focused enterprise absent the organizational drama of fielding an entity per se with the right structural roots or cultural ‘DNA’. Yet, as someone with principal leadership immersion both setting up and managing the ACO ancestry …
Continue reading “Inside ‘accountable care’, challenges to the ACO”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH From the CMS. Originally posted here. To view the live conference video streaming feed, including accessing the agenda and related conference materials and handouts, click here. Please join the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as we host a three-day conference for State Medicaid agencies, and other Federal and …
Continue reading “Medicaid and HITECH Conference: Fourth Annual”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH One of the more popular downsides associated with the growth and dispersion of ACOs in provider [primarily of the ‘institutional variety’ aka hospital/health system] consolidation and asset concentration, is the risk of anti-competitive pricing leverage. You know, the ‘my way or the highway’ approach of certain providers with near or actual …
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH This just in from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation and HDI Forum III: The CMS Innovation Center is helping plan one session of this two-day event. An ACO “deep dive” will demonstrate how Accountable Care Organizations can make effective use of claims data through innovative software services and …
Continue reading “ACO Deep Dive Session at this Year’s Health Datapalooza”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Leveraging up from the Integrated Healthcare Association’s (IHA) work (and others) in the bundled payment domain, @Aetna announced yesterday that in association with partner health information technology vendor @McKesson_HIT, their work with Hoag Orthopedic Hospital (aka @HoagOrthopedic) in Newport Beach, California. Bundled payment a child of the DRG payment system and long …
Continue reading “Aetna teams with Hoag Orthopedic on bundled payment initiative”
By Vince Kuraitis The post originally appeared on the e-caremanagement blog. Last week I wrote about five key differences between formal ACOs (mainly care providers contracting with Medicare) and informal Accountable Care-Like (AC-Like) arrangements between care providers and commercial health plans. Transaction costs Timing Incrementalism Flexibility Capital cost There’s an important 6th difference worth noting: Visibility Formal …
Continue reading “A 6th Difference Between ACOs and “AC-Like” Arrangements”
By Patricia Salber Editor’s Note: Article originally published at The Doctor Weighs In. Recently, The Doctors Company, aka @doctorscompany, the country’s largest insurer of physician and surgeon medical liability, decided to survey doctors to determine what they are thinking and feeling about health reform. The results are pretty gloomy. To put this in context, it is important to understand …
Continue reading “Physicians Surveyed Gloomy About Healthcare Reform”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Thanks to fellow healthtweep @PhilBaumann, I learned of another cool ‘infographic’ app to track and display select hashtag metrics posted to Twitter. Below is the infographic created with Visual.ly for the AMGA 2012 Annual Conference tagged #AMGA12: infographic created with visual.ly
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 …
Continue reading “The Braintrust of Accountable Care aka AMGA Descends Upon San Diego: Who Knew!”
acowatch.me 