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It’s a program set up by the federal health law that many people have never heard about: an independent organization charged with bringing health care professionals and patients together in cooperative research ventures to find the best...
It's a question of major importance to parents, health policy makers and health care professionals — and a focus of national health care quality improvement initiatives. What keeps children from being readmitted to hospitals in the weeks...
More customers are getting better health results through Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana’s Quality Blue Primary Care program – designed to focus care on the patient, give primary care doctors better data and hold down costs. Blue...
With the healthcare industry changing in a thousand different ways all at once, it’s often difficult for organizations to find an entry point into long-term strategic initiatives like population health management and accountable care....
Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) today announced the creation of Blue Distinction Total Care (Total Care), the industry’s largest national network of patient-focused care programs that shift from the fee-for-service model—which...
When the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its landmark 2001 “Crossing the Quality Chasm” report, it called for providers to support continuous healing relationships” with their patients. Although we have seen some progress through the...
Month after month, Natalia Pedroza showed up at the doctor’s office with uncontrolled diabetes and high blood pressure. Her medications never seemed to work, and she kept returning to the emergency room in crisis. Walfred Lopez, a Los...
By 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services wants 85 percent of traditional Medicare reimbursements to be based on quality or value, with 30 percent of payments reimbursed through alternative payment models like Accountable Care...
Think for a moment about what would happen if you upended the whole system of financial incentives for hospitals. What if you said goodbye to what's known as fee-for-service, where hospitals are paid for each procedure, each visit to the...
Synopsis A multipayer medical home program piloted in Colorado led to a sustained reduction in emergency department use and costs over three years, although there were no overall cost savings for practices or patients. Primary care visits...
Last month, world leaders came together to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)--a new global development agenda that sets ambitious targets, such as eliminate poverty, achieve gender equality and end hunger globally. Now, comes...
North Carolina is in the process of overhauling its Medicaid program. The governor and state lawmakers are using a mixture of health care models to put the major players — doctors, hospitals and insurers — all on the hook to keep rising...
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center is the latest to pull out of the CMS Innovation Center's Pioneer ACO initiative, Medicare's earliest and most aggressive test of accountable care, which has lost nearly half its initial cohort. The...
Patients usually don't expect their mouths to get much attention when they visit a primary care physician, but there is reason to change that.  Because dental care is the most common unmet health need in most communities, panelists at...
 On September 28, 2015, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) issued a request for information (“RFI”) seeking comments on two key components of the physician payment reform provisions included in the Medicare Access and...
A new report to Congress on the transparency of Medicaid demonstration waivers is doing little to quell concerns that the CMS needs to beef up its oversight of the policy experiments. Experts say the document fails fully explain how the...
Keeping people out of the hospital is a primary goal of Medicare accountable care. For the most financially successful ACOs, however, that proved difficult last year, even with money on the line. That weak performance, policy experts say...
Gene L. Dodaro, Comptroller General of the United States and head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), today announced the first appointments to the Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee. The Medicare...
“The proper goal for any health care delivery system is to improve the value delivered to patients … To properly manage value, both outcomes and cost must be measured at the patient level,” Harvard’s Robert Kaplan and Michael Porter tell...
Primary care is about to get a louder voice on Capitol Hill with the launch of a new congressional caucus, and the AAFP is calling on members to encourage their legislators to join.  The bipartisan Congressional Caucus on Primary Care, ...

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