Medicare will start compensating physicians for all the work they do to manage the chronic care of beneficiaries. Live, face-to-face encounters with patients will no longer be a requirement for payment.
It's just an extra $42.60 a month in pay for care provided to certain Medicare patients, but for primary care doctors it's a huge cause for celebration.
Finally, Medicare has adopted a new code that pays physicians for the ton of work they and their staffs provide for millions of their sicker patients when the patients aren't seated in front of them.
A lame duck session of Congress begins in just a few days. Democrats will try to pass whatever legislation they can and Republicans will try to hold off on anything until they have full control of the House and Senate. In a nutshell, it has the potential to be what we have become use to – a do-nothing Congress. Unfortunately, if Congress does nothing in this lame duck session, they will complete one thing – put the health and safety of our country at risk by not funding of our public health system.
Physician partners, data systems, and assignment of risk all play an important part in the care and feeding of ACOs
Care coordination networks are a mainstay of the Affordable Care Act’s cost reduction goals. Accountable care organizations, or ACOs, are the most widely recognized of these networks, yet by no means is design of these business arrangements simple or straightforward.
In a basic sense, an ACO joins physicians and hospitals to collectively share financial and medical responsibility for a defined group of patients over a certain period of time. But the universe of possible structures is quite large.
This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Marci Nielsen, Chief Exectutive Officer of the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative, a consortium of over a thousand stakeholders across the health care industry dedicated to promoting the comprehensive care provided in Patient Centered Medical Homes to improve primary care delivery.
Intermountain Healthcare is achieving the Triple Aim through team-based care, mental health integration, and clinician and institutional leadership at all levels.
Health care providers are under tremendous pressure to achieve the Triple Aim of better health for designated populations, better care experiences for patients and reduced cost of care. It comes at a time of enormous transition in health care, in which successful models are hard to find and refine. That's what's so encouraging about the model of personalized primary care that we have been developing at Intermountain Healthcare. The lessons we've already learned are informing our expanding rollout of the model and enhancing the potential for broader scaling.
Using a nurse case-manager-based collaborative primary care team can cut depressive symptoms in patients with type 2 diabetes, according to a study published online Oct. 14 in Diabetes Care.
Ask any health policy wonk what modern health care is supposed to be about, and the person will recite that mantra.
The goal is to provide people with the appropriate level of care where it makes the most sense and without overly delaying treatment. The policy folks will say this "triple aim" is the key to reducing costs and improving quality.
According to a new report, the role primary care physicians play in the payment side of the health care landscape is becoming more important. The Affordable Care Act is expected to add 25 million primary care appointments annually, all of which will be looking for quality care at a lower cost. This gives primary care a unique power to put an end to fee-for-service practices.
Primary care is the key to lowering health care spending. That’s the conclusion of a new study released Sept. 30 by the UnitedHealth Center for Health Reform & Modernization. The challenge for policymakers, medical providers and other health care stakeholders: Unlocking the hidden value in primary care will require expanding primary care capacity and changing the way care providers are paid.
