Mass ONC Departures: Are the Lights On With Nobody Home? Five Critical MU Questions Federal Health Officials Must Answer
Mark Hagland for Healthcare Informatics
“Mark provides a hard-hitting examination of what seems like a leadership crisis at the Office of the National Coordinator. Combine an exodus of top leadership along with a poor report card for MU2, and the prognosis for MU3 does not look very good.” – Naveen
ONC’s 10-Year Roadmap Towards Interoperability Requires Changes To The Meaningful Use Program
Peter Basch in Health Affairs
“Better interoperability is no more a panacea than basic EHRs according to the author of this post. The signal to noise ratio of EHRs could be degraded with formulaic approaches to interoperability. Some of the points made here are echoed in Carl Dvorak’s testimony to the Jason Task Force last August. In that testimony, Epic’s president talked about the importance of the context of information. This post makes the same point and says that accelerating data liquidity without context may not move the needle for anyone.” – Brian
Dual Eligible Medicare Advantage Study Highlights Factors Linked to Diminished Quality Outcomes
Innovalon Press Release
“Additional research by Inovalon on dual eligibles that further expanded upon their research from last year that showed poor results for the dual eligibles on various quality metrics. This follow up analysis focused at the patient-level and demonstrates how differences in dual eligibles’ clinical, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics result in worse performance on a majority of the measures evaluated. With the migration to ‘value-based performance’ (really just pay for performance mostly right now), this is becoming more and more of an issue in quality measurement efforts and various other programs including the Medicare readmissions penalty program.” – Matt
The Patient to Consumer Revolution
Tom Main and Adrian Slywotzky for Oliver Wyman
“Oliver Wyman usually does a good job of combining high level insights with real world examples and a market-focused outlook. Their latest report digs into the world of consumer health, where tech is advancing quickly, but business models and delivery models alike have not caught up. This is not an overnight process. The section on new business models is worth a quick glance.” – Naveen
One in Five Benefit Plans Will Trigger ACA’s “Cadillac” Tax by 2020 Truven Health Analytics Study Finds
Truven Health Press Release
“One of the often overlooked elements of the ACA was the ‘Cadillac Tax’ which starting in ’18 requires employers to pay a 40 percent tax on the net cost of high-cost health plans. New reason by Truven Health shows that it will impact roughly ~15% of employees who have employer-sponsored health insurance in ’18 and increasing to 19% in ’19. Nearly all (81% in ’18 and 84% in ’19) early retiree employer-sponsored health plans will be effected. It still is a ways off in terms of corporate benefit planning but an important trend to follow especially if it leads to more employers to just shift their active and retired employees to the public exchanges in ’17 or ’18 in part due to the ‘Cadillac Tax.'” – Matt
The Unsung Heroes Who Give Up Everything To Take Care Of A Sick Partner
Rebecca Adams and Yagana Shah for The Huffington Post
“Although these vignettes are not that easy to read, this series of articles about non-clinician caregivers gets to the heart of what post-acute care is really about. Caregivers deliver a staggering quantity of the care for patients with chronic conditions. Yet none are really considered to be part of the care team except in unusual circumstances. Care coordination solutions will have to rely on these important members of the “ghost” care team if we hope to improve care coordination.” – Brian
Post-election day: What’s it mean for health IT? — MU 2 numbers disappointing — Google Glass may obstruct peripheral vision
Ashley Gold with help from David Pittman and Arthur Allen for Politico
“Nice recap of what the ’14 election results mean in the interim for Health IT including meaningful use, telemedicine, mobile devices, and the possibility of Congress acting if ONC/CMS are unable are not perceived as driving enough value out of the considerable Health IT investments (+$25B and counting) made by the federal gov’t the last 5 years.” – Matt
How Johns Hopkins Delivers Coordinated Care
Susan Nunziata for InformationWeek
“Overview of Johns Hopkins Community Health Partnership, which uses Salesforce technology to enable home/community-based surveying. Not a fully-baked strategy by any means, but interesting to see A) another example of how Salesforce is deploying in healthcare and B) an all-too-uncommon example of health IT being used to address needs of underserved populations.” – Naveen
Ginger.io Announces Research Collaborations with Leading U.S. Healthcare Institutions
Joe Grimberg for Ginger.io
“Our friends over at Ginger.io prove that there is still a real interest in deploying patient engagement solutions that take into account the mental health status of patients. It is still a pretty exclusively academic interest, but hopefully these efforts will prove the broader utility for solutions like this.” – John 3
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