Evaluation Methods include methods for measuring and comparing the relevant outputs of one or more care processes or care providers to identify best practices, support equitable allocation of incentive resources, or support future decisions about network affiliation or referrals. These methods are borrowed and adapted from other fields, including epidemiology, biostatistics, econometrics and other social and physical sciences.
My father recently forwarded an e-mail he received from a friend with a link to a TV news story about a physician who treated her own husband’s worsening Alzheimer’s disease with coconut oil. My father is interested in the topic, particularly since he knows someone who suffered and died from the disease. He forwarded the
Coconut oil as an Alzheimer’s treatment? Please don’t short-circuit science. Read More »
Click here for PDF copy of slides.
This month, Lyle Nelson of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a “working paper” summarizing the results of a decade of experience with 6 care management demonstration projects in the Medicare population. These demonstrations included a total of 34 disease management or care coordination programs. All of the 34 care management programs were designed to reduce
The vast majority of already-published and currently-underway studies of the effectiveness of the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model of care are pilot studies with fewer than 50 PCMH practices. Most of these studies report or intend to report reductions in hospitalization rates and savings across the entire population of patients served by the PCMH
In a recent post to the Health Affairs Blog, Charles Roehrig, an economist who serves as VP and director of Altarum’s Center for Sustainable Health Spending, presented some very interesting graphics of long term health care cost growth in the U.S. He shows the often-presented statistic of health care cost as a percent of Gross
Telling a 46 year health care cost growth story in one graph Read More »
In last week’s post, I argued that observed over expected analysis (O/E) was commonly misused as a method for doing “level playing field” performance comparisons. I recommend against using it for that purpose. But, is there some other good use for O/E analysis? I can’t think of a good use for the O/E ratio itself
The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) today released the final rule for accountable care organizations (ACO). The new rule includes a number of changes designed to make the Medicare Shared Savings Program more palatable for health care providers who had a largely negative response to the draft rule released last March. The changes include the
HHS Releases Final ACO Rule Read More »
A few years ago, I had a shocking and enlightening discussion about analytic methods with a group of epidemiologists and biostatisticians from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. We were sitting around a table at a conference center in Lansing, where we were debriefing from a meeting of the Physician Group Incentive Program. We were
On top of the Medicare Shared Savings Program (the original ACO initiative) and the Pioneer ACO Program, CMS is now adding four more optional approaches for providers to get reimbursed for Medicare services. The new models all involve bundled payments, where a single negotiated payment covers all professional and facility services for a particular type
A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine compared the economic outcomes of hospital episodes managed by hospitalists to those managed by the patients’ primary care physicians in a Medicare population. Previous studies focused only on the cost of the hospital stay itself, and showed that hospitalists were able to reduce length of stay
