You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘accountable care’ tag.
In this guest post, Judy Rich, president and CEO of Tucson Medical Center, shares the innovative ways her teams are leveraging technology to support improvements in care transitions. Tucson Medical Center is also part of Arizona Connected Care, which was recently selected to participate in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (Shared Savings Program) Accountable Care Organization (ACO), sponsored by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Every hospital executive and clinician today is working to effectively manage what we call the “white space” – the place where patients exist between episodes of care, after a doctor’s appointment, surgery or procedure and before their next touch point or follow up. While it’s challenging to connect with patients once they leave the hospital and are out of our control, doing so is critical to both increasing quality of care and controlling healthcare costs. Mastering the “white space” plays a key role in helping patients stay on the road to recovery and ultimately reduce hospital readmissions.
It’s no secret that the transformation of U.S. healthcare will take a considerable amount of time (measured in terms of generations of people) and resources (both financial and human) to accomplish. But what we need to understand as an industry is that the best way to work toward accomplishing this goal is by transforming the health of individual communities one by one, learning from our successes and failures to make improvements for our neighbors. From there, we can allow the “snowball effect” to help us reach our ultimate goal: improved health for the entire country. Quite frankly the timeline is irrelevant – we must begin making changes now, beginning with the local healthcare delivery system.
This week’s guest post comes from Dean Farley PhD, Vice President at OptumInsight. An advocate for collaboration across all constituencies for better patient care, here he explains how payers and providers can make bundled payments a reality.
The idea of implementing bundled payments can be intimidating for any hospital CFO. But, as a way of paying providers that combines all the services needed to treat a patient, bundled payments are an inevitable step for both payers and providers as the industry heads toward accountable care.
In this week’s guest post Dr. Miles Snowden, chief medical officer at OptumHealth, offers tips for stimulating patient accountability in the age of accountable care.
While payers and providers are usually in the spotlight when it comes to accountable care, the most successful models will be the ones that place a strong focus on patient accountability. More and more frequently patients are selecting doctors with the best outcomes, asking proactive questions, and taking an active role in their lifestyle and behaviors. Empowering patients with the support and tools to be responsible for and more involved in their own health is critical to improving outcomes and reducing costs as part of any accountable care environment. In fact, Optum found that when given more information about a planned elective surgery, 1 of every 15 patients change course – either deferring, choosing a less intensive option, or changing facility or proceduralist.
