News & Updates

The current healthcare landscape is ever-changing, complex, fragmented and a thousand other adjectives. From cybersecurity to quality, policy changes to rising drug costs, there are myriad issues in the industry that are worth addressing.

For physicians, the complicated healthcare environment is only exacerbated by the country’s current insurance system.

A recent LinkedIn survey found 48 percent of physicians support a single-payer healthcare system, according to a post by LinkedIn’s healthcare news editor Beth Kutscher.

“It was a surprising number,” Kutscher told MedCity in a phone interview.

Another 32 percent of respondents were opposed to the idea of a single-payer system and 21 percent said they didn’t know.

The survey, which was part of a larger LinkedIn survey, was conducted between February 7 and February 19. A total of 511 United States physicians responded, 449 of whom are currently practicing. The participants, who come from various specialties, were selected at random. All the respondents noted in their profile that they have an MD degree, Kutscher said.

Why do almost half of the surveyed physicians favor a single-payer system? Some pointed to patients who move from provider to provider through the years.

“There was also a strong human rights theme that came out of the survey,” Kutscher said.

Other respondents noted the inconvenience of negotiating with numerous insurance companies. This frustration was fairly common. Fifty-four percent of physicians claimed they spent time negotiating with insurers. “It’s notable that more than half are actually doing it themselves,” Kutscher said. On average, they spent about four hours per week doing so. “That’s time out of their day. If all patients were in a single platform, [physicians] wouldn’t have to worry about these things,” Kutscher added.

Additionally, 64 percent of respondents said they’ve put new measures into place to ensure payment from patients with high-deductible health plans. Thirty-three percent said they offer payment plans, while 26 percent demand upfront payment. Another 19 percent said they bring on additional team members such as financial counselors to ensure timely payment from HDHP patients.

What about the 32 percent of respondents who said they oppose a single-payer system? Many said they think it could cut down competition or suppress innovation initiatives. Other opposers said they “fear it would give the government too much power over reimbursement rates or that they mistrust the government’s ability to create a viable single-payer system,” according to Kutcher’s post.

The statistics from LinkedIn’s survey show physicians are varied in their opinions about what should happen next in the U.S. healthcare system. But given last week’s AHCA failure, it looks like we’re staying where we are for right now.

Original article can be accessed here.

While Congress continues to hash out the details of a GOP bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, leading public health experts say the debate fails to address the actual challenges to American health and healthcare and will have a limited impact on the health of the population.

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) has released a new discussion paper (PDF) that goes beyond the debates over insurance coverage and creates eight policy directions that are essential to advance American health, healthcare and scientific progress.

The publication is part of NAM’s Vital Directions for Health and Health Care Initiative, which called together more than 150 leading experts 18 months ago to examine ongoing healthcare problems, including high costs, disparities in health and the burden of chronic illness and disability.

The report was written by a bipartisan steering committee, which included Mike Leavitt, former governor of Utah and former secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services; Mark McClellan, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; and Tom Daschle, former Senate majority leader.

“In the midst of all this debate, we cannot afford to lose focus on the ultimate goal of achieving better health for all, for an effective healthcare system that not only helps people prevent and treat their ailments but also helps every American to reach their best health and well-being,” Victor J. Dzau, M.D., co-chair of the committee and the president of NAM, said Tuesday during a conference to unveil the findings.

To achieve this goal, McClellan said the report identifies four priority actions to advance a more efficient and patient-focused health system, as well as four infrastructure needs to support the system.

Priority actions
Pay for value: One of the recurring themes in the 19 papers released as part of the report is the problem with the nation’s fragmented payment system. The report describes the need to align payments with outcomes and results and focus on activities that deliver the best outcome for patients at the lowest costs. To advance value-based care, policy reforms must drive healthcare payment and innovation providing incentives for outcomes and value, help clinicians develop the core competencies required for new payment models and remove barriers to integration of social services with medical services.

Empower people: Healthcare needs to be more democratic, McClellan said. The report calls on policy reforms to encourage clinicians to work with patients and families to ensure the care they provide matches the individual’s goals, work to improve health literacy and communicate in a way that is more understandable to patients, promote effective telehealth tools, and ensure patients have access and ownership of their personal information.

Activate and support communities: In most cases, health is determined by where patients live, what they are exposed to and who they spend time with, according to McClellan. Therefore, the report recommends strategies to support stronger, healthier communities, such as investing in local leadership and infrastructure for public health initiatives, expanding community-based strategies that target high-need individuals, such as patient-centered medical homes, and utilizing resources at the local level to customize and scale community health innovations.

Connect care: McClellan said the final action involves creating principles and standards for end-to-end interoperability, which involves making necessary regulatory and infrastructure changes for clinical data accessibility and use, and identifying information technology and data strategies to support continuous learning.
Essential infrastructure needs
To drive these actions, the report calls for different infrastructure needs, such as:

Measure what matters most: This means a consistent set of core measures must be developed. The report calls on HHS to identify a lead organization for each of the 15 core measures, and ongoing investment in improving performance measurement.

Modernize skills: The country must invest in and train the healthcare workforce to manage increasingly complex patients and populations. This will require reforms in healthcare training and education.

Accelerate real-world evidence: There is much promise in the potential to analyze large amounts of health-related data from actual patient care. But the report says progress has been hampered by technical, regulatory and cultural barriers. Policy reform must draw on real-word evidence to advance continuously learning clinical research, create incentives and standards that foster a culture of data sharing, and partner with patients and family to support evidence generation and sharing of information.

Advance science: To advance the pace of innovation, policies must invest in scientific innovation, support collaboration among government, academia and industry scientists, and streamline regulatory processes.

Article can be accessed here.

Health systems and insurers are actively seeking out technologies and innovations that drive change in the healthcare system, many focusing on solutions that make healthcare a more seamless experience for people to access and navigate. Given that healthcare represents 17.8 percent of the U.S. economy, health plan investment in innovative startups that create efficiencies and enable better patient outcomes should continue for the foreseeable future.

However, while investments are being made, many health plans are challenged to launch and scale commercial partnerships with these innovators after the closing dinner. Some are stuck in a health plan’s procurement spin cycle, or unable to grow beyond an initial pilot, all of which can be a life-or-death challenge for a startup company, only adding to the underlying investment risks.

For health plans’ strategic investment programs to mature, they must resolve the challenge of bringing innovations to scale for the benefit of broader membership.
Ultimately, the burden falls to entrepreneurs to decide where to invest their time and limited resources. I have observed decades worth of partnerships, many of which have not lived up to expectations.

Entrepreneurs should consider the following when evaluating potential strategic partners and investors to increase their chances of success:

Do they have a long-term vision?
Every company has their mission on their website, but is their business structured to support their vision? Not all health plans are aligned with their often transformative-sounding mission statements, and their annual business objectives are not always driving toward marketplace disruption. Entrepreneurs should really examine whether the plan and its leaders are incentivized to implement innovations – or just keep doing what they do.

Right room, wrong people
Time and time again entrepreneurs make agreements with health plans to fund a pilot, the teams get to work, and as the pilot wraps up, no long-term agreements are made. At times technology and time spent are wasted, and entrepreneurs are left scratching their heads.

To ensure a long-term partnership, entrepreneurs must ensure they’ve established direct relationships with a cross-functional team inside the health plan — including an executive sponsor (with real budget and decision-making authority) and leaders from other business units touched by the startup’s technology. Ensuring these key players are making decisions, and offering input from the start will lead to successful partnerships.

Adapt. And then adapt again.
Every health plan has their own processes and systems. Some require procurement approvals in advance, others after some work has been accomplished. Some parties may require roundtables and constant check-ins, while there are organizations that want progress reports at the end of each quarter. In every aspect of health care, no size fits all.

Entrepreneurs must be nimble and adapt to each plans’ internal processes and requirements.

Are they tire kickers?
Not every health plan has deep experience in partnering with startups – and it is clear that few of us get it right the first few times. There are many lessons for organizations to learn about aligning incentives, driving project budgets, making systems integrate and data sharing easier. Entrepreneurs must examine the plan’s track records: Do they stick it out for the long term, or are they tire kickers? Can they execute on the partnership once they make the investment? If entrepreneurs find stage-agnostic portfolios with a track record of long-term investment commitments, chances are the plan is in it for the long term, and not looking to kick the small guys to the curb.

Healthcare is a mess, and the industry has many problems and needs. Smart entrepreneurs have no shortage of opportunities to create billion dollar companies. However, if companies choose to use partnerships to speed their growth and development, entrepreneurs must always keep in mind that the wrong partner can smother them with attention, bury them in the process, and ultimately freeze them in pilot mode. Many strategic investors are looking for ways to facilitate these partnerships to run more efficiently and allow for better functioning. Startups and entrepreneurs, let us know what you are experiencing, what’s working well, and what’s not, in the market.

Original article can be accessed here.

The newly merged Envision Healthcare is looking into divesting its once indispensable ambulance and medical transportation business to focus on growth of its bigger physician staffing division and reduce debt.

Presenting at the Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference Monday, Envision CEO Chris Holden said physician service revenue and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization are growing faster in physician services than medical transportation.

Greenwood Village, Colo.-based Envision also has a plump pipeline of potential acquisitions of physician practices, an industry still fragmented and dominated by small “mom and pop” groups, Holden said.

Meantime, Envision’s medical transportation business remains the largest in the U.S. with almost 5 million patient transports last year and more than 270 contracts for 911 services.

But the lion’s share, or $750 million, of Envision’s $900 million capital budget in 2017 is earmarked for physician practice acquisitions vs. $75 million for medical transportation.

The opportunities that Envision sees in physician services is what is giving rise to a strategic review of whether to sell the medical transportation business, known as American Medical Response, and a much-smaller population health management division called Evolution Health.

Envision’s all-stock merger with Nashville-based Amsurg in December created the nation’s largest physician-staffing company, with more than 19,000 physicians and clinicians and annual revenue of more than $10 billion. “It is the engine of the company,” Holden told the Raymond James analysts.

Physician staffing vendors such as Envision, TeamHealth and Mednax provide contract doctors to various hospital departments, including the emergency departments, hospitalists, radiology, anesthesiology and neonatology.

Before the merger, medical transportation was viewed by Envision management as critical to the company’s growth strategy.

Then-CEO Bill Sanger, who is now executive chairman of the merged Envision, noted during earnings calls that medical transportation provided cross-selling opportunities to hospitals for physician services and would play a role in Envision’s ability to bundle services from transport to departments across a hospital.

“But that was the old Envision,” said Richard Close, securities analyst in the Nashville office of Canaccord Genuity.

In the merger, Envision and Amsurg brought their own customer bases to the tie-up, providing abundant cross-selling opportunities, Holden said.

And Envision wants to bring down its leverage a bit, Close said.

At Raymond James, Holden said Envision’s debt is about 4.3 times EBITDA, which is above the 3 to 4 times EBITDA that the company feels comfortable at.

If AMR were to be sold, it would bring Envision down into that range, he said.

Original article can be accessed here.

Jennifer L. Wiler, MD, MBA; Harold D. Miller; and Nir Harish, MD, MBA
March 08, 2017

The American Journal of Accountable Care. 2017;5(1):51-53

ABSTRACT
The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) of 2015 encourages the development of physician-focused alternative payment models (APMs). This creates the most significant opportunity in 2 decades to meaningfully redefine how physicians are paid for their services. Whether this results in better care and lower spending, and whether it helps or harms physician practices, will depend heavily on how HHS implements APMs. In this article, we draw on the experience of past and present payment reforms to suggest principles for successfully designing APMs.

Five Principles for Successful APMs

1. Provide the Resources Needed to Deliver Higher-Value Care
An overarching goal of APMs is to slow the growth in healthcare expenditures. However, APMs, which blindly incent decreased utilization of services, can worsen access to care and health outcomes for patients.1 Adding penalties based on quality can protect some patients, but harm others whose care needs fall between the many cracks in current quality measures.

A major weakness in the current fee-for-service (FFS) systems is lack of payment for many high-value services that could address patient needs at lower costs. For example, patient education and self-management support can help patients with chronic disease to avoid hospitalizations, but they are not adequately supported by payers. Similarly, supervised exercise therapy can achieve equal or better outcomes than surgery for many patients with diseases such as peripheral artery disease and joint osteoarthritis, but it is not adequately supported by the current payment systems. A successful APM will give physicians the flexibility and resources they need to deliver higher-value approaches to patient care.
2. Hold Physicians Accountable Only for the Aspects of Cost and Quality They Can Control
A second weakness of traditional FFS payment is that it neither rewards nor penalizes physicians based on the overall cost of treating a patient’s problem or the outcomes achieved. In contrast, capitation payment systems reward physicians for avoiding high-need patients and penalize them for costs they cannot control. The reasons capitation systems were abandoned in the past was not a lack of adequate information technology or quality measures, but rather the inappropriate transfer of full insurance risk to physicians. Many current payment reforms that hold physicians accountable for all spending on their patients create the same problems under a different name.

There is a middle ground between FFS and full-risk global payments.2 In many pilot programs, physicians have demonstrated the willingness and ability to reduce costs and improve quality for the services they both deliver and order if they have the resources needed to do so. A successful APM will hold physicians accountable for aspects of costs and quality they can control (eg, how many tests they order, which procedures they perform, how well they prevent avoidable complications), but not for the things they cannot (eg, the services ordered by other physicians for different health problems, increases in the prices of drugs they prescribe).
3. Improve Payment for Specialty Care, Primary Care, and Inpatient Procedures
Most payment reforms to date have taken 3 forms: primary care medical homes, bundled/episode payments for inpatient procedures, and accountable care organizations (ACOs). Although high-quality primary care, inpatient surgeries, and care coordination are essential to higher-value healthcare, the majority of services are delivered outside of inpatient settings and by specialists, not primary care physicians. Not every acute condition is something that good primary care can prevent, and the mere fact that services are more “coordinated” does not mean they are achieving the highest value.

Although a majority of healthcare spending is associated with a small proportion of patients who have multiple health problems or require very expensive services, most patients receive healthcare services for individual problems. Every patient deserves high-quality, affordable care, and for many patients, that care will be delivered by a specialist in an outpatient setting, not by a primary care physician, a hospital, or a care manager employed by an ACO.

In order to deliver higher-value care, the barriers that specialists face under the current payment system must be removed. Primary care medical homes and surgical episode payments are not readily adaptable to most types of specialty care,3 and it is neither necessary nor desirable to force every patient to be part of a large ACO in order to receive better care. Appropriately designed APMs are needed in every specialty so that all patients can benefit from higher-value care.4
4. Allow Flexibility to Customize Service Delivery Approaches to Local Resources
The significant variation in care delivery within and across regions has been well documented. Much of this variation is avoidable and represents an important opportunity for physicians to improve quality and reduce costs under an APM. However, some of the variation reflects fundamental differences in the resources that communities have available to deliver care. A patient who has an acute stroke may be managed by an internist, neurologist, intensivist, or stroke specialist depending on where that patient lives; similarly, patients with back pain may be managed by internists, physiatrists, pain management specialists, or spine surgeons in different communities. Local regulations, workforce capacity, disease epidemiology, and patient expectations significantly impact how care must be delivered.

To be successful, APMs must allow flexibility in the types of services to be delivered and the types of providers who can deliver those services. Success should be measured based on outcomes, not on adherence to 1-size-fits-all standards for structure or processes, and performance benchmarks must reflect differences in the costs and outcomes that are achievable in rural areas, inner-city communities, and so on.
5. Minimize Administrative Burden
The complexity of current payment models and the systems used to administer them have significantly increased the costs of healthcare in the United States without corresponding improvements in outcomes. APMs represent an opportunity not only to improve care delivery, but to eliminate unnecessary administrative burdens. Just as care delivery should be redesigned to eliminate waste, no administrative requirements should be included in APMs unless the likely benefits will significantly exceed the costs.
Conclusions
By encouraging APMs, MACRA provides an unprecedented opportunity to encourage innovations in care delivery. However, just because a payment model is different does not mean it will be better. The success of APMs will depend heavily on how they are designed and implemented. We believe that these 5 principles can guide the development of APMs that enable better outcomes for patients at a more affordable cost and that physicians can enthusiastically support.
Author Affiliations: Department of Emergency Medicine; University of Colorado School of Medicine (JLW), Aurora, CO; Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (HDM), Pittsburgh, PA; Department of Emergency Medicine, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar; Yale School of Medicine (NH), New Haven, CT.

Source of Funding: None.
Author Disclosures: The authors report no relationship or financial interest with any entity that would pose a conflict of interest with the subject matter of this article.

Authorship Information: Concept and design (JLW, HM, NH); of the manuscript (JLW, HM, NH); critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content (JLW); administrative, technical, or logistic support (JLW); and supervision (JLW).

Send Correspondence to: Jennifer L. Wiler, MD, MBA, Associate Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Colorado Denver SOM, 12401 E. 17th Ave B-215, Aurora, CO 80045. E-mail: jennifer.wiler@ucdenver.edu.
REFERENCES
1. Grumbach K, Osmond D, Vranizan K, Jaffe D, Bindman AB. Primary care physicians’ experience of financial incentives in managed-care systems. N Engl J Med. 1998;339(21):1516-1521.

2. Miller HD. From volume to value: better ways to pay for health care. Health Aff (Millwood). 2009;28(5):1418-1428. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.28.5.1418.

3. Wiler JL, Beck D, Asplin BR, et al. Episodes of care: is emergency medicine ready? Ann Emerg Med. 2012;59(5):351-357. doi: 10.1016/j.annemergmed.2011.08.020.

4. Miller HD. Win-win-win approaches to healthcare cost control through physician-led payment reform. Clin Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2014;12(3):355-358. doi: 10.1016/j.cgh.2013.12.002.

Original article accessed here.

Hospitals and physician groups across the country are beefing up merit pay for quality and patient satisfaction in their physician compensation plans. But Geisinger Health System is doing something radically different.

The 12-hospital system based in Danville, Pa., did away with physician bonuses altogether this summer and put all of its 1,600 employed doctors on a straight salary.

Geisinger also made the decision to pay each physician at or above the national average whether in primary care or a specialty. “We don’t have below-average doctors so we don’t pay anyone below average,” Geisinger CEO Dr. David Feinberg said.

That Geisinger would abandon a compensation model that previously paid physicians 80% straight salary and a potential 20% performance bonus runs counter to what’s happening with many health systems and physician groups.

Most systems see the emergence of value-based reimbursement, encapsulated in legislation like the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, as requiring the rewarding or penalizing of physicians for performance on quality and patient satisfaction scores.

They are shifting their compensation plans to put more emphasis on attaining those types of benchmarks rather than the old ways of predominantly rewarding throughput.

For example, Crystal Run Healthcare, a 300-physician group based in the lower Hudson Valley community of Middletown, N.Y., today pegs up to 15% of total physician compensation to quality, cost and satisfaction measures, said Dr. Scott Hines, Crystal Run’s chief quality officer and medical director.

That percentage is set to rise to 30% over the next three years because “more and more contracts are being tied to clinical quality and lower costs,” Hines said. He’s seeing the same trend with both government and private payers.

The compensation model at the 1,200-physician Henry Ford Medical Group in Detroit is a little different but similarly aimed at elevating quality and patient satisfaction, said group CEO Dr. William Conway.

The group’s primary-care physicians next year will get a greater portion of their compensation based on how many consumers choose them as their doctor than today’s model, which is predominantly based on the volume of relative value units they perform. RVUs represent a Medicare formula for reimbursing physician services that blends the time it takes to perform a service with the skill level behind that care. A committee of the American Medical Association establishes the relative weights of physician RVUs.

While RVUs determine 66% of pay at Henry Ford today, it becomes a 50/50 split next year between RVUs and patient sign-ups, Conway said. That model also provides an incentive for physicians to perform well on quality and patient satisfaction since consumers will see physicians’ work rated online and can base their selections accordingly, Conway said.

The shift is a response to changes in government reimbursement, not the markets. “It’s about the Medicare payment rate,” Conway said.

Medicare has been coaxing hospital systems and physician groups to organize themselves around taking on more risk for the cost and quality of the care they provide. It’s part of a long process under the Affordable Care Act and MACRA of moving away from fee-for-service to value-based reimbursement.

That philosophy has given rise to advanced alternative payment models. These are Medicare programs that give physicians extra incentives to manage the risk of certain populations or accept bundled payments for targeted procedures rather than paying in the traditional way.

Examples include the Comprehensive End-Stage Renal Disease Care Model and the Medicare Shared Savings Program. To participate, hospital systems and physician groups have developed provider networks, in some cases accountable care organizations, to make sure their patients have access to coordinated services across geography and specialties.

Those organizations are all a little different and offer their physicians different compensation incentives to participate. “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen one,” Conway said.

Alternative payment models, or APMs, have been exploding in popularity, according to the CMS. From their inception as part of the ACA the four APMs offered by CMS in 2017 now have 359,000 participating clinicians, providing care to 12.3 million Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, according to the CMS.

The Next Generation ACO, a model that provides participating doctors even more risk and reward than under the Medicare Shared Savings Program, added 28 groups in 2017 and now has 45, the CMS said.

Looming ahead is the new change agent for physician reimbursement models: MACRA. Though its implementation was recently delayed almost two years until 2018, MACRA establishes two new payment tracks for physicians treating patients holding government-sponsored insurance.

Clinicians in advanced alternative payment models can earn annual bonuses of 5%. But the majority of physicians will participate in the Merit-based Incentive Payment System under MACRA. On that track, physicians can earn plus or minus 4% of reimbursement in 2019, 5% in 2020, 7% in 2021 and 9% in 2022.

While physicians at Geisinger participate in a variety of APMs, the integrated delivery network has gone to straight salary for its employed physicians—rather than an 80/20 mix of salary and merit bonuses. Its physicians don’t need incentives to do the right thing for patients, said Dr. Jaewon Ryu, Geisinger’s chief medical officer.

If they provide quality care in the right setting, Geisinger will do well financially on the 551,000 enrollees in its health plans for whom it takes full risk, Ryu said. And it will qualify to collect the at-risk portion of value-based payment models whether government-sponsored or commercial.

UnityPoint Clinic, with 500 physicians in clinics across Iowa and Illinois, wants 33% of physician compensation by 2020 to be based on the value metrics of patient care, said Keith Seashore, UnityPoint Clinic’s chief financial officer.

Those incentives now constitute 14% of compensation, with 86% of salary measured largely as a function of productivity, he said. UnityPoint Clinic is piloting a compensation model at five locations that will take the entire organization to its 33% goals, Seashore said. In those locations, about 20 physicians and 10 advanced practitioners have 33% of their compensation based on productivity, 33% on straight salary and 33% on the quality, cost and satisfaction variables, he said.

The physicians driving the pilot believe that mix will align better with the additional risk UnityPoint wants under MACRA and the APMs, Seashore said.

He added that the changes will be rolled out slowly so that the clinic’s physicians feel comfortable that the data collected for determining compensation are fair and accurate.

CareMore, a Cerritos, Calif.-based clinic operator and health plan for frail seniors, incentivizes its physicians to keep patients out of the hospital, said CEO Dr. Sachin Jain.

Jain, a former adviser to the Obama administration, said CareMore employs 80 “extensivists,” whose job is to track frail patients so they get the medications and care they need at home and in settings outside the hospital.

The physicians, who earn on average about $200,000 annually, can earn an additional 5% to 65% in incentives by managing their patients so that hospitalization is a last resort, Jain said. That might mean making sure a patient has proper food, that they are not being dehydrated by lack of air-conditioning and other items that might fall outside the typical things that doctors are responsible for.

Preventing hospitalization, Jain said, “is one of the purest metrics of clinical success.”

Original article accessed here.

After years of lobbying to repeal and replace the ACA, House Republicans put forth The American Health Care Act on Monday. Here are 10 things to know about the legislation.

1. The AHCA would eliminate the ACA’s individual mandate, or requirement for American adults to enroll in health insurance. Further, the legislation eliminates the tax penalty adults faced if they were not covered. However, the concept of penalties still remains in some form: To encourage people to buy coverage, the AHCA lets insurers charge a 30 percent penalty for those who let their health plans lapse and try to buy a new policy, according to NPR.

2. The AHCA calls for Medicaid expansion to remain in effect through Jan. 1, 2020. This is different from earlier drafts of legislation, which called for an immediate reversal of Medicaid expansion. Thirty-two states, plus Washington, D.C., have opted to expand Medicaid under the ACA. By 2020, the government will “freeze” the expanded programs and restrict funding only to people who were in the program as of then — no added enrollees from that date on. States would keep getting that amount of federal aid for each Medicaid enrollee as long as the enrollee doesn’t lose eligibility for more than a month. There is also a provision in the AHCA that calls for grants of extra Medicaid provider reimbursement funds to go toward states that didn’t expand Medicaid.

3. The AHCA restructures Medicaid’s federal funding to a per-capita cap opposed to the current open-ended federal entitlement, reports Politico. States would receive capped payments based on how many people are enrolled in Medicaid. The plan also calls for more frequent eligibility testing of Medicaid enrollees.

4. The AHCA restructures Americans’ tax credits to buy health insurance. It replaces income-based subsidies under the ACA with refundable, age-based and income-capped tax credits, according to Politico. These credits increase with age, from as low as $2,000 for those under 30 or as high as $4,000 for those over 60. There would be a limit as far as credits for a single household — $14,000 — and subsidies would be eliminated over time for individuals with annual income of $75,000 and for families with annual income of $150,000, according to the report.

5. A few ACA staples roll over in the AHCA. The ACA provision related to pre-existing conditions would remain intact, meaning insurers would not be able to deny coverage or increase prices for people with such conditions, reports Reuters. Also, the AHCA retains provisions allowing adults up to age 26 to maintain coverage through their parents’ health plans, according to the report.

6. The AHCA eliminates the cap on the tax exemption for employer-sponsored insurance. Although earlier drafts of legislation capped the exemption at 90 percent of current premiums, the final version eliminated the proposal, according to Politico. The bill also gets rid of the penalty for businesses that do not offer employees health coverage.

7. The AHCA delays the effective date for the ACA’s Cadillac Tax on costly health plans from 2020 to 2025, according to The Hill. GOP lawmakers are delaying but keeping the tax to make certain their replacement plan will not increase the national deficit after a decade.

8. The AHCA bars federal Medicaid funds or federal family planning grants for Planned Parenthood clinics, according to the report. (Separate from the AHCA, the White House earlier this week extended terms for a compromise to Planned Parenthood by proposing maintained federal funding if the group agrees to discontinue providing abortions, according to ABC News.)

9. The cost of the AHCA is not yet known. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has not yet scored the legislation, which means there is neither a cost estimate for the plan or how many Americans would gain or lose insurance under it.

10. What’s next? The House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees are expected to review the AHCA legislation Wednesday. If the committees approve the measure, the full House could potentially act on it before April 7, according to The New York Times. The measure would then be taken up by the Senate.

Original article can be accessed here.

Because Sunil Budhrani, M.D., has spent about 20 years treating patients in emergency departments, he knows all too well that many people still go to the ED for minor injuries or illnesses.

Budhrani, now the chief medical officer of Innovation Health, is “amazed” that he continues to see patients come to the ED for conditions like cuts, bruises and sore throats, he said in a recent interview.

“Clearly, you come in with symptoms like that, it creates distress for everyone, because you never really want to be in the ER because you’re happy,” he said, noting that such patients often face long wait times.

Often urgent care centers or retail clinics are a better option for many acute, non-life-threatening conditions, according to Budhrani. And more than just patient satisfaction is on the line—if Americans turned to those alternative sites instead of the ED for non-emergency care, it could save $4.4 billion annually, he noted, citing a past study from Health Affairs.

That’s part of why Budhrani spent the early 2000s building out urgent care centers, then later co-founded a telemedicine company. “Much of my career has been focused on, what are the best places for people to obtain their care?” he said.

Now at Innovation Health—the joint venture between Aetna and Inova Health System—Budhrani is leading the organization’s effort to direct patients to the most appropriate care setting.

A new feature of that effort is an illustrated decision tree that helps patients decide whether an urgent care center or ED is the right place to be treated for the symptoms they’re experiencing.

Innovation Health takes a two-pronged approach to sharing such educational materials and messages, Budhrani said: It distributes them to providers as well as directly to members/patients.

“Being that we’re a unique model, of an insurance company half-owned by a major health system or provider, Inova, and by a major insurer, Aetna, we have opportunities to reach our members and providers in a way that most people can’t,” he said.

That means leaders like Budhrani can sit at a table and communicate directly with the medical directors of a major health system like Inova about how to instruct members about the services Innovation Health offers. Innovation Health also reaches out through its contractual relationship with other providers to let them know that it has one of the largest networks of urgent care centers in the region.

As for its direct-to-member approach, Innovation Health connects with them through channels like mail, postings on social media, local broadcasts and more, Budhrani said. Materials like the new decision tree are also a complement to tools that Aetna has already deployed like the app iTriage, which navigates members to the closest ED or urgent care center after they type in the symptoms they are experiencing.

While the decision tree is relatively new, Innovation Health already has some positive feedback from distributing it to its non-physician leadership team and their families, Budhrani noted. “They found this greatly helpful because it just created in a picture format, a step 1, step 2, step 3 approach to thinking about their symptoms,” he said.
The overarching goal, according to Budhrani, is to drive home the message to members that they can save themselves a lot of time, money and resources if they go to the right place to receive care.

“Frankly, working in the emergency room, there is still a lot of confusion where to go, and the more we can education our members before they actually get sick and before they actually need the urgent care, the better off everyone is,” he said.

Original article can be accessed here.

FORT WORTH, Texas — Her mother’s breathing had become labored in the wee hours of the night, during what would prove to be the Fort Worth woman’s final days living with lung cancer. Distraught, the daughter called 911.

“Her mother was having some pretty severe shortness of breath,” said Tim Gattis, the third paramedic to arrive on scene late last year. “She was certainly working very hard to obtain a breath, and was just not being successful.”

Gattis pulled up in a sports utility vehicle shortly after the ambulance had arrived, and the first two responders were already loading the 64-year-old woman into the back. The daughter was insisting that her mother go straight to the hospital, Gattis said.

But the role of Gattis and other Fort Worth paramedics trained for this type of hospice support — part of a local partnership with VITAS Healthcare, the country’s largest hospice organization — is to spend a longer stretch of time on the scene to determine if the symptoms that triggered the 911 call can be addressed without a trip to the emergency room. MedStar Mobile Healthcare, a governmental agency created to provide ambulance services for Fort Worth and 14 nearby cities, is one of several ambulance providers nationwide that have teamed up with local hospice agencies. The paramedic backup, enthusiasts argue, not only helps more hospice patients remain at home, but also reduces the potential for costlier and likely unnecessary care.

On average, 18 percent of hospice patients go to the emergency room at least once before their death, according to an analysis of Medicare data published last year in the journal Medicare data published last year in the journal Medical Care. Melissa Aldridge, the study’s lead researcher and an associate professor at New York City’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, describes paramedic-hospice partnerships such as Fort Worth’s as “forward-thinking” in promoting better patient care.

Hospices also can financially benefit, she said, since they’re paid a flat rate — typically just under $200 a day — regardless of where their patients are treated. So, any hospital treatment related to the patient’s condition, such as pain stemming from advanced cancer, would come out of that payment, she said. “For [the agencies], it could definitely be worth it, particularly for the one or two outlier families who seem to be using the emergency department fairly heavily during a hospice stay,” Aldridge said.

An Expanding Role
These emerging programs rely upon a new type of emergency responder. Dubbed community paramedics, they can offer a range of in-home care and support for home health patients, frequent 911 callers and others to reduce unnecessary ambulance trips. MedStar’s community paramedicine program had already been launched, when VITAS got in touch.

The Affordable Care Act had been passed, and with it the inclusion of financial penalties for hospitals if their patients return too quickly to the hospital. John Mezo, senior general manager for the Fort Worth region of VITAS, said that since many VITAS patients come from hospital referrals, it’s important that the hospice not become “a big problem for our referral sources,” he said.

So in 2012, Fort Worth’s VITAS program began contracting with MedStar, targeting patients who have been flagged during the hospice admissions process as moderately to highly likely to call 911 or end up in the hospital. (VITAS pays a flat monthly fee to MedStar for each patient enrolled.)

Once signed up, hospice patients calling 911 can be identified through various routes, including their address, name or phone number. Then a community paramedic like Gattis, who is available for home health and other types of calls, including hospice, is dispatched along with the traditional ambulance response, said Matt Zavadsky, MedStar’s chief strategic integration officer. The ambulance provider now contracts with two hospice agencies and is in talks to add others, he said.

In Ventura, Calif., a similar hospice initiative is being piloted through a state agency — part of a larger multicity effort there to study the use of community paramedics. That pilot, which has worked with some 20 hospice agencies since 2015, sends out a community paramedic to any 911 call involving a hospice patient. Also, a large Long Island, N.Y.-based health care system added similar paramedic backup last year for a portion of its hospice patients living in Queens under a grant-funded project.

If any of those nearly 180 patients or their family members calls the 24/7 hospice number with an urgent situation, a community paramedic can be immediately sent, said Jonathan Washko, assistant vice president of emergency medical services for the system, Northwell Health.

It’s “extremely rare” that patients call 911 directly, Washko said, “because we get them help, just as if they would have called 911.”

Navigating Final Days
The uncomfortable truth is that a patient on hospice can develop unsettling and sometimes scary symptoms during their final weeks or days. Secretions can accumulate in the throat, which might sound like choking, even though the patient is not, Mezo said. The patient might suffer a breathing crisis or a seizure.

VITAS stresses that a hospice nurse is available around-the-clock, by phone or to stop by. But family members can understandably be loath to wait for a nurse who might have to drive from an hour away, Mezo said.

“When it’s your loved one there and you’re in charge of them, it’s very frightening,” he said. “If you’ve ever had to call 911, even five minutes waiting on an ambulance seems like an eternity, right?”

For paramedics involved, the work has proven to be challenging and gratifying, requiring a mix of psychology and social work skills along with medicine. “You can’t Google what to do in these situations,” said Ambrose Stevens, a Ventura community paramedic, who has responded to about 40 hospice calls.

By the end of 2016, Ventura paramedics had responded to 258 hospice calls, but paramedics needed to access hospice-provided medications for pain, nausea and other symptoms in fewer than 2 percent of those calls, said Mike Taigman, project manager of Ventura County’s Hospice Community Paramedicine Pilot Project. “Most of what we do is really helping coordinate, talk people down from being upset, helping remind them of what hospice is all about,” he said.

Offering The Option
Patients or their family members can still insist on going to the emergency room, and sometimes they do. Of the 287 patients enrolled in Fort Worth’s program for the first five years — all of whom had been prescreened as highly likely to go to the hospital — just 20 percent, or about 58 patients, were transported, according to MedStar data. In Ventura, ambulance transports for hospice patients calling 911 also have declined — from 80 percent shortly before the program’s start to 37 percent from August 2015 through December 2016, according to data provided by Taigman.

That difficult night in Fort Worth, Gattis put the VITAS nurse on speaker as they talked to the daughter about ways to keep her mother more comfortable at home. The daughter agreed to hold off on ambulance transport and see if anti-anxiety medication and morphine would ease her mother’s breathing struggles.

Within a half-hour, Gattis said, it was apparent that the medicine was helping. “She was feeling better to the point that she could eat a little bit of a sandwich.”

Gattis stayed for more than an hour until the hospice nurse arrived. The woman died several days later in her own bed.

KHN’s coverage related to aging & improving care of older adults is supported by The John A. Hartford Foundation. Coverage of end-of-life and serious illness issues is supported by The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Article can be accessed here.

The bill was expected Feb. 27 after a congressional recess, but was leaked to Politico and published Friday.

Most of the reconciliation bill is simply a more detailed version of the policy brief revealed last week — it would repeal Medicaid expansion, a host of taxes and dismantle current cost-sharing subsidies under the ACA — and replace those items with a number of proposals that have been popular with Republicans.

Here are the five most important details to know about the proposal, as reported by Politico.

1. The main revenue generator behind the bill is a cap on tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance. The bill repeals a number of taxes and tax increases installed under the ACA including the medical device tax and health insurance tax, among others. In place of these taxes, the bill caps the amount employers can contribute tax-free to employees’ health plans. Benefits that exceed the 90th percentile of current premiums would be taxed, according to Politico. If that sounds familiar, that’s because the cap is similar to the ACA’s Cadillac tax on luxury employer-sponsored health plans, which was a 40 percent excise tax paid for by insurers. The unpopular tax was delayed due to opposition from companies and labor unions that would have had the costs passed down to them.

“Capping the exclusion is the same thing [as the Cadillac tax], but it’s a much more direct hit on companies and consumers,” Russell Sullivan, a partner at McGuireWoods and one of the principal drafters of the Cadillac tax, told Becker’s Hospital Review. Both the cap on employer exclusion and the Cadillac tax would put downward pressure on prices by discouraging overuse of healthcare services, which is common with generous health plans. Also similar to the Cadillac tax, the proposal will likely face opposition from businesses and labor unions, according to Mr. Sullivan. “This expands the battlefield,” he said.

2. The bill would roll back Medicaid expansion. Of course, states would have the option to continue with the expansion, but they would no longer receive enhanced federal funding to do so, which could make the option impossible financially. The bill lays out a proposal to instead cap federal Medicaid funding based on how many people qualify by state. However, to help offset the repeal of Medicaid expansion, the bill would restore cuts made to Medicare disproportionate share hospital payments under the ACA. The healthcare reform law reduced DSH payments presuming coverage would increase and the need for uncompensated care would decrease, particularly with Medicaid expansion.

3. The bill would also repeal the individual mandate and the premium subsidies. Instead of tying subsidies to income, they would be linked to age. Tax credits would start at $2,000 for people under age 30. They increase in steps of $500 per decade of life, reaching $4,000 for people over age 60. In the absence of the mandates, the bill would encourage people to maintain coverage by allowing payers to penalize beneficiaries for any lapses in coverage by increasing future premiums by 30 percent. It would also encourage more young, healthy people to buy health plans by increasing the age rating band tied to insurance plans from 3:1 to 5:1, according to Politico. This means insurers can charge older beneficiaries up to five times as much as younger beneficiaries for the same plan. Currently this ratio is limited at 3:1 under the ACA.

4. The bill also offers more detail on plans to help subsidize the cost of covering more expensive enrollees, such as those with pre-existing conditions. It would allot $100 billion in state innovation grants, which can be used in a number of ways at a state’s discretion to help offset the costs of high-cost patients. One option is the money could be used to reinstate high-risk pools for people with pre-existing conditions.
5. This bill is not finalized. The leaked version is still unnamed and unnumbered and considered a discussion draft. A number of issues are still disputed among Republicans. Representatives who held town halls about the ACA are finding their views are not as simple as for or against, The New York Times reported earlier this week. Leadership may also oppose certain elements. For example, Politico reported HHS Secretary Tom Price, MD, would want the subsidies to be lowered from the current proposal. Congress plans to take up discussion again next week when they return from recess.

Article can be accessed here.