Cyndy Nayer – The Health Care Blog

ACOs Are Doomed / No They’re Not

Nov 4, 2014• 38

By THCBist

A number of pundits are citing the systemic failure of ACOs, after additional Pioneer ACOs announced withdrawal from the program – Where do you weigh in on the prognosis for Medicare and Commercial ACOs over the next several years?”

Peter R. Kongstvedt

Whoever thought that by themselves, ACOs would successfully address the problem(s) of [cost] [access] [care coordination] [outcomes] [scurvy] [Sonny Crockett’s mullet in Miami Vice Season 4]? The entire history of managed health care is a long parade of innovations that were going to be “the answer” to at least the first four choices above (Vitamin C can cure #5 but sadly there is no cure for #6). Highly praised by pundits who jump in front of the parade and declare themselves to be leaders, each ends up having a place, but only a place, in addressing our problematic health system.

The reasons that each new innovative “fix” end up helping a little but not occupying the center vary, but the one thing they all have in common is that the new thing must still compete with the old thing, and the old thing is there because we want it there, or at least some of us do. The old thing in the case of ACOs is the existing payment system in Medicare and by extension, our healthcare system overall because for all the organizational requirements, ACOs are a payment methodology.

A New Era in Value-Driven Pharmaceuticals

May 22, 2014• 3

By Leonard Kish & Cyndy Nayer

At the end of March the Amercian College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) issued a joint statement saying they “will begin to include value assessments when developing guidelines and performance measures (for pharmaceuticals), in recognition of accelerating health care costs and the need for care to be of value to patients.”

You may have heard of value-based medicine, but are we entering a new era of value-based medications or value-driven pharma?

Price transparency is great, but it has be combined with efficacy to get to value (price for the amount of benefit). Medical groups are catching on to how important value assessments are, because if patients can’t afford their medication, they won’t take their medication, and that obviously can turn into poor outcomes.

Twenty-seven percent of American patients didn’t fill a prescription last year according to a Kaiser Family Foundation Survey. This trend seems likely to continue as we move toward higher-deductible plans, where those with insurance can have great difficulty affording medications.

Included in the ACC/AMA statement was a quote from Paul Heidenreich, MD, FACC, writing committee co-chair and vice-chair for Quality, Clinical Affairs and Analytics in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.

“There is growing recognition that a more explicit, transparent, and consistent evaluation of health care value is needed…These value assessments will provide a more complete examination of cardiovascular care, helping to generate the best possible outcomes within the context of finite resources.”

Spreading risk and payment to different members of the health care value chain is beginning to make it apparent to more people and organizations that resources are finite. Patients and their physicians are starting to ask which treatments are worth the cost and have best likelihood of adherence.

An outgrowth of the move toward digital health and accountable care is that we’re entering every patient into a potential personal clinical trial with their data followed as a longitudinal study, and we can look much more closely at efficacy and adherence and reasons why it happens and why it doesn’t.

It won’t be long before we start to see comparative effectiveness across a variety of treatments and across a variety of populations. When we can connect outcomes data, interventions and costs all in the same picture we begin to see where the value (price against results) is and where it isn’t.