February 14, 2012 Mark Hagland
blog
Just recently, I’ve been looking back at some statistics of particular interest, as many of us head off to HIMSS12 in Las Vegas next week. One data-driven report that came out in late September 2011 strikes me now as especially worthy of comment. On Sep. 28, the folks at the Lebanon, N.H.-based Dartmouth Atlas Project released a report showing that little progress was made during the five-year period from 2004 through 2009 in the area of working to reduce hospital readmissions.
January 31, 2012
news
The Washington D.C-based National Quality Forum (NQF) is endorsing four use measures on healthcare resource use and costs. The measures, which focus on diabetes and cardiovascular care costs as well as total primary-care costs, can provide vital data on how resources are used in these areas of care says NQF. The data, the organization claims, will help create a more efficient, less wasteful healthcare system.
January 31, 2012 Mark Hagland
blog
The results coming out of three years of hospitals' participation in the Premier Health Alliance's QUEST program are in, and they are stunning. When it comes to performance improvement, both on the patient safety/care quality side, and on the cost-reduction side, the QUEST results show that there is no excuse for lack of performance improvement.
January 18, 2012 Mark Hagland
article
The Premier healthcare alliance QUEST program has involved three years of intensive work around patient safety, care quality, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness work among member hospitals. Marquee headline results include 25,000 lives and $4.5 billion estimated to have been saved in the past three years.
December 28, 2011 Mark Hagland
blog
There are many ways to look at the December 19 announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had approved the participation of 32 patient care organizations from across the country in Medicare’s new Pioneer Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) initiative.
December 26, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
Analysts at CSC have developed a new research report that looks at the overlapping requirements between several key healthcare reform-driven programs under Medicare and the meaningful use process under the ARRA-HITECH Act, and have major recommendations for CIOs, CMIOs and other healthcare IT leaders when it comes to preparing to meet the data reporting and other IT-related requirements under all of the programs.
December 5, 2011 Gabriel Perna
article
For this podcast, we speak with Mark Hagland, editor-in-chief of Healthcare Informatics, about the December issue cover story on data reporting mandates, and what they mean in the context of case studies of organizations that have already made progress on data reporting.
July 11, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
On April 18, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) created a proposed rule for the Medicare Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) that encompasses a number of important changes.
May 18, 2011 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
blog
At the “Health IT in an Era of Accountable Care: Update from the Beacon Communities” meeting, hosted by the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings (Washington, D.C.) in collaboration with The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) payment reform was one of the topics at the forefront of the conversation. With WellPoint Inc. announcing its mandatory value-based purchasing program, the time has never been more prescient for continuing the conversation about getting payers involved in quality-based medicine and payments.
May 18, 2011 Mark Hagland
blog
The recent announcement by WellPoint Inc., which pays 1,500 hospitals for services to 34 million of its members in 14 states, that it was moving to a mandatory value-based purchasing program should light a major fire under most hospital organizations in this country. Not only is WellPoint one of the largest private health insurers in the U.S.; its market clout and reach alone mean that its decision to implement a mandatory quality-driven reimbursement program speaks volumes about where healthcare payment is headed, not in the next decade, but in the next few months.
May 5, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
When on April 29, 20011, the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a final rule on value-based purchasing (VBP) for hospital reimbursement under Medicare, for payments beginning in fiscal year 2013, some in the industry had mixed comments on the rule. Among those was Blair Childs, senior vice president for public affairs at the Charlotte-based Premier Health Alliance, which represents more than 2,500 hospitals nationwide.
April 30, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
On April 29, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a final rule on value-based purchasing for hospital reimbursement under the Medicare program, for payments beginning in fiscal year 2013.
