Health Insurance Industry Consolidation: Any ‘Qui Tam’ Exposure?

by Gregg A. Masters, MPH If you’re a health policy junkie like me, then the best show in town (or anywhere for that matter) was in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., where HMO industry veteran and Chairman, President and CEO of Aetna Mark T. Bertolini and Anthem President and CEO Joseph R. Swedish among …

Precision Medicine v. Accountable Care: A Faux Choice?

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Whether you call it personalized medicine or as Eric Topol MD prefer’s ‘individualized medicine’ or even via the possible conflation of the two c/o the President @BarackObama ‘Precision Medicine’s’ initiative (see fact sheet here), it strikes me that we may need an emerging business model glossary to make sure we’re …

Accountable Care Round Up

by Gregg A. Masters, MPH One of the ongoing challenges in ‘new media’ is to effectively discern the content ‘signal to noise’ ratio given the ease of publishing these days. Everyone is a potential publisher and not all curation is of equal value nor newsworthy per se. As heard at a Health 2.0 meeting some …

123 ACOs Join the Shared Savings Dance Card

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH CMS has announced another round of certified ACOs participating in the Medicare Shared Savings Program effective for January 1, 2014. The complete list is available here. One observation I’ll make is Universal American (UAM) seems to remain active in building a national footprint of managed ACO collaborations. Their risk sharing …

Accountable Care, mhealth and the Triple Aim

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH For those of you following this blog you know I write about ACOs and the emerging accountable care zeitgeist. My lens has been forged by decades of experience in the ‘managed competition’ experiment. For an earlier piece see: ‘Some Context and Perspective on Standing Up the ACO.’  The managed competition …

ACA, Accountable Care and the @HealthcareGov Fiasco

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH With the quiet time afforded this ‘Thanks Giving-Kah’, I feel called to express some ‘dis-ease’ with the progress towards our pursuit of the triple aim or sustainable healthcare ecosystem. As if the health reform battle hasn’t been a power partisan exchange from day one. Think again… If you weren’t paying …

The Accountable Primary Care ACO

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH At the recently concluded 4th Annual Accountable Care Organization Congress held in Los Angeles one of the sessions I attended was offered by Tom Doerr, MD, Director of Innovation Research, and Deborah W. Robin, MD, MHCM, Medical Director, of Lumeris respectively, titled “New Hope for Primary Care: The Accountable Primary …

The ACO Narrative: ‘Accountable Care 2.0 is a Journey, Not a Program’ or ‘ObamaCare is Toast’?

Earlier today we spoke with Dr Jerry Penso, Chief Medical and Quality Officer for the American Medical Group Management Association (AMGA), and Jim Hansen, Vice President at the Accountable Delivery Systems Institute (ADSI) a unit of Lumeris. To listen to the broadcast click on the ‘This Week in Accountable Care’ graphic below: The context for …

4th National ACO Summit: Some Contextual Reflection

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH When ‘Acting Administrator’ of CMS Don Berwick gleefully announced the final rule guiding the development and Federal certification of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) on October 20th, 2011, he thereby officially unleashed the power of the largest single payer for healthcare services in the United States to simultaneously govern while informing …

4th National ACO Summit Day 2

By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Day two for me started in Track 6: Engaging Patients in their Medical Care, titled ‘Patient Engagement in Healthcare Decision Making‘ breakout session moderated by Shannon Brownlee (@ShannonBrownlee), Senior Vice President, Lown Institute; Former Acting Director Health Policy Program, The New America Foundation; Author, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making …