Bulletin Board
Bulletin Board
Medicare ACOs Showing Promise
Medicare’s Shared Savings Program and its accountable care organizations are showing promise as a means of reducing Medicare spending and improving the quality or care. Or so concludes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General. According to a new OIG report, Over the first 3 years of the program, 428 participating Shared Savings Program ACOs served 9.7 million beneficiaries. During that time, most of these ACOs reduced Medicare spending compared to their benchmarks, achieving a net spending reduction of nearly $1 billion. At the [...]
Leave 340B Alone, CMS Advisory Group Says
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services should not significantly reduce Medicare payments for some prescription drugs. Or so says one of CMS’s own advisory panels. The agency’s Advisory Panel on Outpatient Prospective Payment reached this conclusion after listening to testimony from hospital industry stakeholders who told of the savings the federal government’s 340B prescription drug discount program produces and how those savings enable hospitals in low-income areas to help low-income patients who would not otherwise be able to afford their drugs and help improve access to care for low-income [...]
Little Rhyme or Reason to Post-Stroke Care Choices
Despite medical recommendations that stroke patients choose inpatient rehabilitation facilities for their post-acute care, significant numbers of patients continue to seek such care in skilled nursing facilities. And experts do not understand why. The choices, according to a new study, are based primarily on recommendations by hospitals and are being made despite a recommendation by the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association that patients turn to inpatient rehab facilities rather than skilled nursing facilities for post-stroke care. Researchers found no apparent reason for the choices patients make between the [...]
Improvements Inspired by Readmissions Reduction Program Level Off
After major improvements during the early years of Medicare’s hospital readmissions reduction program, the program is no longer showing significant new gains. While Medicare readmissions have fallen from 21.5 percent to 17.8 percent since 2007, there has been very little improvement since 2012, suggesting that most of the benefits from the program have already been achieved. And in FY 2018, Medicare will penalize almost the same number of hospitals it penalized in FY 2017: approximately 80 percent of the hospitals subject to the program. In FY 2018, the average penalty [...]
Serving High-Risk Patients Leads to VPB Penalties
Practices that served more socially high-risk patients had lower quality and lower costs, and practices that served more medically high-risk patients had lower quality and higher costs. These patterns were associated with fewer bonuses and more penalties for high-risk practices. So concludes a new study that looked at the results of the first year of the Medicare Physician Value-Based Payment Modifier Program. The study looked at 899 physician practices serving more than five million Medicare beneficiaries, and it points to the continuing challenge of how best to serve patients who [...]