There are many good people at the CMS Innovation Center (CMMI). They mean well. They are our friends. But friends need to call out friends when they are out of line. I received an email this morning from CMS announcing the launch of their new “Value-Based Care Spotlight” website. Right near the top of the
For many years, I’ve been following and writing blog posts about one of my heroes, Don Berwick, a physician leader, Obama-era CMS Administrator and one of most eloquent, persistent and effective advocates for quality improvement in health care. In a recent viewpoint article in JAMA, Dr. Berwick and two physician co-authors, Thom Meyer (from Duke)
In an excellent article in New York Times Magazine, Jeneen Interlandi reported on her interviews with leaders of CDC’s new $200M Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), and provides context regarding the challenges to infectious disease modeling in general. But Ms. Interlandi and the CFA leaders that were interviewed missed a really import point.
This month, disappointing evaluation results call for re-thinking of our approach to improving specialty care. Nancy Keating and 12 of her colleagues from multiple medical schools and consultancies working with the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) published the results of their formal evaluation of the Oncology Care Model (OCM), a three-year large-scale
The Epic Sepsis Model (ESM) is a widely used proprietary predictive model that was described as having poor performance in a validation paper by Wong et al, citing low area under the ROC curve (AUC). But the evaluation failed to specify the intended protocol in which the ESM was intended to be used, and failed to include estimates of the outcomes of that protocol compared to usual care.
The Biden administration’s CMS Innovation Center 5-year vision conspicuously lacks mention of what I consider to be necessary course corrections to reverse a disappointing first decade.
What is missing from the CMS Innovation Center five year vision? Read More »
As reported in a rambling article in the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Nuance Communications, Inc. The WSJ predicted, with its usual WSJ bravado, that this bold $16B move (paying 13 times Nuance’s 2020 revenue) will “kick start growth” in the “next big thing” — “healthcare.” But, this is not a
In a recent health policy viewpoint article in JAMA, Drs. Don Berwick and Rick Gilfillan noted that, although the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) has done some good during its ten+ years of existence, it has failed to “become the engine that it could be for transforming the nation’s health care finance
Dr. Ward shares insights in an interview conducted by Gurmeet Judge, CEO of Encompass Business Techologies, an IT services company based in Vaughan, Ontario (suburb of Toronto) for the Encompass Blog. The hour long interview covers a wide range of topics of interest to leaders of both health care and non-health care organizations as they navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic and prepare to deal with the post-pandemic world, including the expected post-Covid wave in business and clinical activity, leadership strategies to build trust, talent and agility, and applying pandemic-style simulation analytics to business decisions.
Motivated by duty to protect others, fear of infection and desire to comply with social and legal expectations, most people are complying with recommendations for mask-wearing in public indoor spaces and places where social distancing is difficult. But the definition of “mask” has grown to include a diverse collection of devices and garments, made of
