Archive for the ‘Consumer-Driven Healthcare’ Category

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Infographic: What Customers Expect from the Healthcare Industry

May 22nd, 2013 by Patricia Donovan

What do consumers think about the healthcare customer experience?

Top-level healthcare executives are focusing on the customer experience to compete for patient loyalty and referrals in today’s unstable healthcare market. But, before they begin, they need to understand how customers perceive healthcare companies and how the customer experience impacts their decision-making. TeleTech® performed an in-depth study of healthcare customers and examined their sentiments about the healthcare experience. Their findings are reflected in this infographic.

What Customers Expect in the Healthcare Industry

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You may also be interested in this related resource: 2011 Benchmarks in Patient Satisfaction Strategies: Improving the Healthcare Consumer Experience.

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Posted in Consumer-Driven Healthcare, Infographics, Patient Satisfaction | No Comments »

Infographic: The 5 C’s of Healthcare for 2013

March 11th, 2013 by Patricia Donovan

2013 will be the most important year in U.S. healthcare industry in modern history thus far, according to Deloitte. The nation’s fiscal challenges and the healthcare industry’s bulk are on a collision course, says the consulting firm, predicting that the story line about healthcare in 2013 will center on five themes: Clarity, Costs, Compliance, Consolidation, and Consumers.

The infographic below highlights each of these themes and what the nation might expect in 2013 from each.

2013's 5 C’s of Healthcare

Get the latest healthcare infographics delivered to your e-inbox with Eye on Infographics, a bi-weekly, e-newsletter digest of visual healthcare data. Click here to sign up today.

You may also be interested in this related resource: Healthcare Trends & Forecasts in 2013: Performance Expectations for the Healthcare Industry.

Posted in Compliance, Consumer-Driven Healthcare, Healthcare Costs, Healthcare Trends, Infographics | No Comments »

Infographic: Strategies to Slow Health Spending Growth

March 4th, 2013 by Patricia Donovan

This set of policies proposed by the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System to accelerate innovation in care delivery could slow health spending growth by $2 trillion over 10 years. Suggestions include provider payment reforms, high-value consumer choices and healthcare market improvements.

healthcare spending

Get the latest healthcare infographics delivered to your e-inbox with Eye on Infographics, a bi-weekly, e-newsletter digest of visual healthcare data. Click here to sign up today.

You may also be interested in this related resource: Moving Forward with Payment Bundling.

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Posted in Bundled Payments, Consumer-Driven Healthcare, Healthcare Administration, Healthcare Costs, Healthcare Reform, Infographics, Physician Practices | No Comments »

Medicare Aims to Improve User Experience

September 7th, 2012 by Cheryl Miller

Medicare user

Two new initiatives designed to help Medicare beneficiaries better understand their benefits are now available.

CMS has redesigned its Medicare Web site, Medicare.gov, in an attempt to simplify the language and home page layout and make the content more accessible and quicker to navigate for Medicare beneficiaries, families and caregivers.

Users can now do the following directly from the home page:

  • Search for whether a specific test, item, or service is covered under original Medicare;
  • Get customized information based on a beneficiary’s specific situation;
  • Get quick links to replace a lost Medicare card, find a Medicare Advantage or prescription drug plan, and get help with healthcare costs.

And HHS has partnered with five major pharmacies to make educational materials on Medicare benefits more widely available, including information on newly available preventive services, and savings on prescription drug spending in the “donut hole” coverage gap.

Some examples of how the pharmacy partners, which include CVS Caremark, Walgreens, Thrifty White, Walmart, and Sam’s Club, will work together to increase awareness include the following:

  • CVS Caremark will distribute material to beneficiaries at its more than 7,300 CVS/pharmacy stores and 600 MinuteClinic locations, through brochures, register receipt messages and online;
  • Thrifty White pharmacy will provide information through its 85 locations throughout the midwest;
  • Walgreens will distribute information in nearly 8,000 pharmacies and over 350 Take Care Clinic locations, as well as use in-store announcements;
  • HHS will also work with Walmart and Sam’s Club to provide healthcare information to their shoppers online.

Other pharmacies or partners can find information on how to work with CMS to educate consumers about the benefits available to them, while interested users can visit the new Medicare benefits site.

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Posted in Consumer-Driven Healthcare, Customer Service, Healthcare Reform, Medication Management, Prescription Drugs | No Comments »

New HCAHPS Measure Would Evaluate Quality of Care Transitions

April 27th, 2012 by Patricia Donovan

Beginning in January, patients discharged from the hospital could be asked three key questions to assess the quality of their care transitions, as part of a proposed new measure in the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) Survey.

As part of a proposed rule issued April 24, CMS wants patients about to be discharged to respond to the following three statements about the care transition:

  • During this hospital stay, staff took my preferences and those of my family or caregiver into account in deciding what my healthcare needs would be when I left.

  • When I left the hospital, I had a good understanding of the things I was responsible for in managing my health.

  • When I left the hospital, I clearly understood the purpose for taking each of my medications.

For the last question, patients would be able to indicate that they were not given any medication at discharge.

The proposed questions are based on the three-Item Care Transition Measure developed by the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center for the NQF Endorsement Project entitled “National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Quality of Cancer Care.” Detailed information on scoring methodology can be found on the Care Transition Measure Web site.

CMS also wants to add two "About You" items to the survey that would not be included in public reporting of the HCAHPS survey but would be employed in the patient-mix adjustment:

  • During this hospital stay, were you admitted to this hospital through the Emergency Room?

  • In general, how would you rate your overall mental or emotional health?

CMS said it has received numerous inquiries and requests from hospitals and researchers to add a survey item concerning patients' overall mental health. Some researchers claim that mental health status is an important factor in how patients respond to HCAHPS survey items.

The HCAHPS Hospital Survey is a standardized survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients' perspectives on hospital care. In its current form, the HCAHPS survey contains 18 patient perspectives on care and patient rating items that encompass eight key topics: communication with doctors, communication with nurses, responsiveness of hospital staff, pain management, communication about medicines, discharge information, cleanliness of the hospital environment, and quietness of the hospital environment.

The survey also includes four screener questions and five demographic items, which are used for adjusting the mix of patients across hospitals and for analytical purposes. The current survey is 27 questions in length.

Posted in Consumer-Driven Healthcare, News, Transitions in Care | No Comments »

6 Features of CMS’s Redesigned Medicare Summary Notice

March 12th, 2012 by Cheryl Miller

In light of ongoing healthcare reform there is a push for clarity, as several of our stories illustrate this week. Medicare claims forms have been redesigned so that beneficiaries and their caregivers can better understand them, check for important facts and potential fraud. The subject of fraud is particularly timely given the story that has been circulating for the last week involving the arrest of a physician, the office manager of his medical practice, and five owners of home health agencies. They’ve been charged with allegedly participating in a nearly $375 million healthcare fraud scheme involving fraudulent claims for home health services.

When given the option of choosing a high or low cost health plan, consumers will most likely choose the higher cost plan because they associate it with better quality, says a new study funded by the AHRQ. But researchers caution that this isn’t necessarily true: higher costs could be attributed to unnecessary services or inefficiencies. A push is underway to simplify public physician and hospital report cards, and make them clearer for consumers to understand (not unlike the redesigned Medicare claim forms) so consumers can make better informed decisions about their health coverage.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Group Health Research Institute have launched a new national project intended to shed light on what makes a successful health practice tick. Designed in response to the burgeoning shortage of primary care practices, the project will identify successful practices that improve patient and practice outcomes, and share the information so they can be replicated.

And lastly, a study debunks the long held belief that HIT will improve cost savings by reducing the need for diagnostic testing; instead, the study shows that having computerized access to EHRs in the ambulatory setting could result in a 40 to 70 percent increase in testing.

Don’t forget to take our latest survey: Physician Reimbursement Models. Describe the physician reimbursement models in place at your organization by April 15th and you will receive a free summary of survey results once it is compiled.

These stories and more in this week's Healthcare Business Weekly Update.

Posted in Affordable Care Act, Avoidable ER Use, Behavioral Health, Consumer-Driven Healthcare, Health IT, e-Health | No Comments »

Forget About the Pizza, What About the Sodium?

December 7th, 2011 by Cheryl Miller

Pizza is not a vegetable.

That’s the word from the American Heart Association (AHA) on Congress’s much publicized perceived push for pizza to move to the top of the school lunchroom’s food pyramid, a decision sure to disappoint children everywhere.

But reports have since shown that what Congress actually did was to maintain that the tomato paste in pizza sauce is a concentrated form of tomatoes, and should be counted as such. So that an eighth of a cup of tomato paste, the amount often used in a serving of pizza, should be considered equivalent to a half cup of vegetables. According to a recent article by Sarah Kliff in the Washington Post's Wonkblog, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) did not want to credit a volume of fruits or vegetables that was more than the actual serving, and Congress blocked this.

The USDA's proposed changes were the first changes in 15 years to the $11 billion school lunch program, according to USDA officials, as cited in an article in the New York Times, and were meant to reduce childhood obesity by adding more fruits and green vegetables to lunch menus.

And while no one can debate the benefits of tomatoes, Kliff's article goes on to compare the nutritional facts of tomato paste, no salt added, with fresh fruits, and they appear similar, except for the sodium, where tomato paste outweighs the fruit by 33 mg to 1 mg.

And so the real culprit here is not Congress or even pizza, but the amount of sodium in foods, and whether or not it should be regulated.

Sodium has been proven to cause cardiovascular (CV) disease, a relationship recently reaffirmed by the CDC. And CV disease keeps increasing, according to the CMS: “Heart disease causes one of every three American deaths and constitutes 17 percent of overall national health spending, costing $444 billion every year in medical costs and lost productivity in Americans.”

The statistics for diabetes, a preventable disease often caused by poor lifestyle and unhealthy eating, are equally staggering: 78,000 children develop type 1 diabetes every year. The problem is so severe that the United Nations recently held its annual summit on non-communicable diseases, namely cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, CV disease and diabetes. It was the second of its kind to focus on a global disease issue; the first health-related UN Summit addressed AIDs.

And according to a recent study from the Commonwealth Fund, 32 percent of children ages 10 to 17 are overweight or obese.

So, given the amount of calories, fat and sodium in the pizza that contains the pizza sauce that contains the tomato paste, one of the last things our school kids need is more pizza in their diets.

What they do need is to be offered the tools to learn and make independent decisions not only outside the classroom, but inside the classroom as well, and the lunchroom is a good place to start.

But if Kliff is right, the lunchroom just might be the last place for kids to get a good education.

While the U.S. Department of Agriculture writes guidelines for what school meals should look like, few schools actually follow them. Just 20 percent of schools served meals that met federal guidelines for fat content, according to a 2007 USDA audit.

Posted in Behavioral Health, Case Management, Consumer-Driven Healthcare, Disease Management, Healthcare Costs, Healthcare Trends | No Comments »

Healthcare Industry Not Prepared to Protect Patient Privacy; Data Breaches Rising

October 3rd, 2011 by Cheryl Miller

As new uses for digital health information emerge and access to confidential patient information expands, a majority of healthcare organizations are not prepared to protect patient privacy and secure data, says a new report from the Health Research Institute (HRI) at PwC US. And medical identity theft is on the rise; according to a recent PwC HRI survey, theft accounted for two thirds of total reported health data breaches over the past two years. Healthcare organizations need to update practices and adopt a more integrated approach to ensure that patient information doesn't fall into the wrong hands, the report advises. We report on this story at length in this week's Healthcare Business Weekly Update.

Annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage increased to $15,073 this year, up 9 percent from last year, according to a recent Employer Health Benefits survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET). Premiums increased significantly faster than workers' wages and general inflation.

To help its members navigate healthcare services and costs, BCBSF has introduced a new transparency tool, "Know Before You Go." Designed to help its members navigate through the healthcare system, it provides information based on hospital data reported by CMS. The tool is customized to a member's benefits and takes into account deductibles, copays and/or coinsurance amounts and estimates how much a treatment or procedure will cost.

And we are compiling research for our second annual survey on tactics to reduce avoidable emergency room visits. We will e-mail all respondents a summary of results once they are compiled. To participate, click here.

Posted in Affordable Care Act, Avoidable ER Use, Behavioral Health, Consumer-Driven Healthcare, Healthcare Administration, Healthcare Costs, Healthcare Toolkits, Healthcare Trends | No Comments »

New Transitions of Care Credential Program for Case Managers

September 14th, 2011 by Cheryl Miller

A timely new certification in care transitions recognizes skills and expertise in patient handoffs between sites of care.

The Case Management Society of America (CMSA) and the American Board of Quality Assurance and Utilization Review Physicians, Inc. (ABQAURP) are collaborating to create a sub-specialty certification for transitions of care (TOC.) According to the CMSA web site, this new credential is

"the first one to support professionals not only as a team, but also individually, who demonstrate competence and skills in providing the key elements of transitions of care."

Successful transitions of care from one managed care environment to another are key to reducing hospital readmissions and improving overall healthcare costs and patient satisfaction. According to market research compiled in Healthcare Intelligence Network's second annual Managing Care Transitions Across Sites survey conducted in May 2010, the hospital-to-home transition is the most critical transition in care, followed by skilled nursing facility (SNF)-to-home (49.2 percent) and ER-to-home transitions (45.9).

But until now, care transitions haven't traditionally been part of medical education and training; according to the American Geriatrics Society:

  • Nearly 20% of Medicare patients readmitted to hospital within a month
  • Patients are frequently confused and dissatisfied by the discharge process
  • Communication between hospitalists and PCPs is equent

    • And patients are suffering: from those recently hospitalized who are often discharged without proper instructions on what medications to take or resume taking to faulty or incomplete handoffs of patients between provider shifts in teaching hospitals that may be responsible for more medical errors than overworked, sleep-deprived medical residents.

    The majority of HIN's survey respondents said that post-transition patient contact, such as home follow-up visits and post-discharge telephone calls, were the most successful strategies to improve care transitions.

    And more than half of the respondents said that the case manager was most frequently charged with care transition management.

    Says Jan Van der Mei, continuum case management director at Sutter Health Sacramento Sierra Region:

    "One of the main focuses for care coordination is to avoid duplication of services when patients move from one site of care to the next. When someone is leaving the hospital, care coordination can help the patient get a follow-up appointment. When you are monitoring the patient, it may be helping them get to the office instead of going to the ED.

    "It is also many rounds of addressing the psychosocial issues and making sure that patients can actually make it to their appointments - that they have transportation and that when they get a new prescription, they are able to pick up the prescription and pay for it," Van der Mei continues.

    Other elements for care coordination involve making sure when a PCP refers a patient to a specialist, that the specialist has the necessary information so they can provide the assessment that is being sought without actually duplicating tests that have already been done, recommends Van der Mei.

    Says Mary Beth Newman, MSN, RN-BC, CMAC, CCP, CCM, as quoted on the CMSA web site:

    “...we have worked hard to design the credential to help identify best practices, as well as to assist case managers in making recommendations that balance the appropriateness of health care services with cost and quality as related to transitions. It is vital that the program address the need for effectiveness, efficiency, equity, safety, and timeliness in transitions of care."

    Posted in Accountable Care Organizations, Affordable Care Act, Avoidable ER Use, Case Management, Consumer-Driven Healthcare, Disease Management, Healthcare Administration, Healthcare Costs, Healthcare Quality Ratings | 2 Comments »

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