Medicare/Medicaid

A Congressional Budget Office report finds that the growth in healthcare cost inflation in the Medicare and Medicaid programs has slowed in the short term, with healthcare reform-driven reimbursement changes a possible factor in the trend

Of the 258 accountable care organizations (ACOs) recognized by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), 60 of them, from more than 15 states, have joined together to form the National Association of ACOs (NAACOS), a non-profit organization that allows ACOs to work together to increase quality of care, lower costs and improve the health of their communities.

Direction The federal Health IT Policy Committee met for their monthly meeting this past week in Washington and Meaningful Use Stage 3 was back on the agenda. In under a month, ONC staff culled through more than 500 comments submitted to the Policy Committee that underscored concerns regarding the timing of Stage 3, the growing list of competing priorities for providers and a feeling that more interoperability limitations needed to be addressed.

When Carolyn Clancy, M.D., announced on Jan. 31 that she was leaving the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which she had headed for almost exactly 10 years (she became that agency’s director on Feb. 5, 2003, after previously working at the agency as director of its Center for Outcomes and Effectiveness Research), it signaled the end of an era.

I was fascinated last month by a New York Times article I read about an initiative tying physician pay in New York City’s public hospitals to the outcomes measures those hospitals will be paid against under healthcare reform.