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Tag: Pay for Performance

Dr. Yes

• 10

By David Dranove

Last week I attended a conference on health policy at the University of Chicago, where I moderated a panel that examined implementation of the Affordable Care Act. For much of our time, the panel focused on Accountable Care Organizations. Panelists and attendees wondered whether ACOs would meet the same fate as Integrated Delivery Systems of the 1990s. Some in the audience mentioned that when it comes to integration, electronic medical records could be a game changer. EMRs could be used to monitor and reward cost saving decision making, for example. But most ACOs are still figuring out how to use EMRs for clinical decision making; their use in helping managerial decision making remains far off.

As more and more speakers expressed skepticism about the future of ACOs, a physician in the audience offered a truly fresh perspective, one that makes me feel much more optimistic. I never learned this physician’s name, so I will call him Dr. Yes. Before I summarize Dr. Yes’ argument, it is helpful to turn back the clock to the late 1990s, when IDSs were taking the health industry by storm. Perhaps the defining feature of IDSs in the 1990s was the integration of hospitals and primary care physician practices. This strategy failed in large part due to classic agency problems. In a nutshell, an agency relationship can fail because of incentive problems (the principal is unable to effectively motivate the agent) or selection problems (the principal employs the wrong type of agent.) IDSs suffered both. When hospitals acquired physician practices, they converted entrepreneurs into employees who resisted any kind of incentive payments. As employees, primary care physicians did not work as hard or show as much commitment to their practices. Moreover, those physicians most eager to give up their autonomy were those looking to dial down their practices and lead the “quiet life.” In these ways, IDSs experienced both incentive and selection problems, with devastating results.

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Out of the Box Thinking on Avoiding Hospital Readmissions. Stop Trying

• 16

By Dr. Wes

As a cardiac electrophysiologist, I’m pretty far removed from public policy.  But I have to admit that I was interested in the latest move by CMS to cut their Medicare payment rates to hospitals by invoking pay cuts for hospital readmissions.  The Chicago Tribune‘s article is enlightening and filled with some interesting anecdotes after the first round of pay cuts were implemented:

(1) The vast majority of Illinois hospitals were penalized (112 of 128)

(2)  Heart failure, heart attack, and pneumonia patients were targeted first because they are viewed as “obvious.”

(3) “A lot of places have put a lot of work and not seen improvement,” said Dr. Kenneth Sands, senior vice president for quality at Beth Israel.

(4) Even the nation’s #1 Best Hospital (according to US News and World Report) lost out.

So what’s a hospital to do?

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The Destructiveness of Measures

• 11

By Dr. Wes

A little box pops up before him asking if he asked the patient about the exercise.  He mumbles something under his breath, clicks a little box beneath the question, then moves on.

This is what medicine has become:  a series of computer queries and measures of clicks.  It must be measurable, quantifiable, and justifiable or it didn’t happen.

Do they ask if I asked them about if they used cocaine?  Of course not: too politically incorrect.

Do they ask if I really listened to their heart?  Of course not – this activity is not a paid activity.

Do they ask about the myriad of phone calls and e-mails to arrange for a procedure?  Nope.

Do they measure my time with the patient when I go back to see them on the same day?  Nope – not paid for.

So what’s the motivation for doctors to be doctors?  Are we retraining our doctors from care-givers to data providers?  What are we losing in turn?

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The KP Model in the UK

• 1

By Richard Hoey

I’ve had a couple of meetings recently with leading figures in UK health policy – one of them a senior figure at a doctors’ organisation, the other at a private health company – who both talked excitedly about the lessons Britain could learn from the US.

That’s rarer than you might think. Our National Health Service may be cautiously embracing market-led reforms, but there’s still plenty of scepticism about the US’s full-on competitive system, and people here tend to be nervous about citing it as an inspiration.

Still, the two figures I am referring to, both leading players in the British Government’s NHS reform programme, were talking not about US healthcare as a whole, but about one particular organisation with something of a cult following on this side of the Atlantic.

I am referring to Kaiser Permanente, and its ideas are about to become very big over here.

Kaiser is one of those iconic organisations that aren’t just known for what they do, but whose names come to define their particular way of doing things – in Kaiser’s case, managed care.

It is the classic managed care organisation, running all the disparate parts of the local health system as a fully integrated whole, and deftly incentivising doctors to make sure patients receive their care in the part of the health system where it can be delivered most efficiently.

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Medicare Advantage Star Ratings: Detaching Pay from Performance

• 5

By Douglas Holtz-Eakin

Rewarding quality health plans is an admirable goal for the Medicare Advantage program. Unfortunately, the current system of linking star ratings to bonus payments and rebate adjustments instituted by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (and expanded by the CMS Quality Bonus Payment Demonstration) fails to achieve that goal, and depending on its specific implementation, may even be counterproductive.

Because criteria for evaluation are not published until after the period for which performance will be evaluated, there is no possibility that MA plans will be able to improve their performance to achieve the goals CMS intends to incentivize. Any adjustment plans will be able to make to their bids or plan offerings would have to be aimed at increasing enrollment in counties with the highest bonuses and rebates based on data from performance in previous years, possibly at the expense of improving their performance in the future.

The system rewards beneficiaries for choosing those plans favored by the selected CMS criteria, rather than the plans that best meet their needs. In effect patients whose preferences, health status, and even counties of residence, don’t match the CMS model of a highly rated plan will be at a disadvantage. Simultaneously, the system will likely reduce the scope of choice available to MA-eligible beneficiaries, and reduce competition among MA plans.

Finally, the system rewards beneficiaries for living in counties with low poverty rates (since relatively wealthier counties tend to have more plans with higher ratings), thus adversely impacting poor beneficiaries even more than non-poor beneficiaries.

These impacts are inconsistent with the overall policy purpose. The goal of incentivizing quality health plans is legitimate and admirable; that goal will not be achieved by the rating structure currently being put into place.

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Bernie Madoff Accounting for Medicare

• 4

By John Goodman

On the eve of the release of this year’s Medicare Trustees report, the Obama administration released its own version of it. In the administration’s telling:

  • Health reform (ObamaCare) will save taxpayers $200 billion in the Medicare program through 2016.
  • About 90% of these savings will be produced by lowering “excessive payments” to Medicare Advantage plans, lower payments to doctors, hospitals and other providers to reflect their “improved productivity,” and through efficiencies gained by what is learned from “demonstration projects.”
  • The demonstration projects include pay for performance, bundling, Accountable Care Organizations, and other frequently discussed ideas.

But whereas the Trustees report is expected to be a serious document, reflecting accepted accounting principles, the administration’s document was clearly a piece of political propaganda — one that stretched the truth so much that the word “spin” would be a charitable description. For example, the administration’s document failed to mention that:

  • The Congressional Budget Office has studied the demonstration projects on three separate occasions (here, here and here) and each time has concluded that they are producing no serious savings and are unlikely to do so in the future.
  • Medicare’s Actuary has determined that reductions in payments to Medicare Advantage plans will not only result in lower benefits for the one in four seniors who are in these plans, but that about 7 ½ million enrollees will actually lose their coverage and have to seek more expensive Medigap insurance elsewhere.

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GAO and CMS Spar over Research Methods: Media (as usual) Miss the Boat

• 5

By David Dranove

The New York Times and other media outlets are trumpeting a new GAO report that blasts an ongoing $8 billion Medicare demonstration project. CMS has put the money towards a new pay-for-performance scheme for Medicare Advantage plans. The media have focused their attention on part of the GAO study describing how most of the money will go to average performing plans (those receiving as few as three “stars” out of a possible five), with 90 percent of plans receiving some sort of bonus.

If that were the gist of the GAO complaint, then the GAO would have been the ones guilty of wasting taxpayer money for writing a useless report. But the key elements of the GAO report pertain to a different matter: will the demonstration allow CMS to determine whether the new pay-for-performance scheme is superior to the existing scheme? Here the GAO report gets bogged down in the details of research methodology. The media understandably got lost in this discussion and have given this part of the report short shrift. As a result, I expect politicians to blast CMS for “giving $8 billion to bad health plans” and other stuff of nonsense.

Let me explain why it is pointless to focus on how the money is distributed among Medicare Advantage plans. The purpose of any pay-for-performance scheme is to provide incentives for improving quality. (A scheme that rewards the best plans but does nothing to alter the status quo really is a waste of money.) Some of the comments by the GAO and aped by the media would have you believe that the best way to improve quality is to reward the top achievers. Tell this to parents of a D student who would be grateful to see their child get C’s. Should they tell their child “we will take you on a nice vacation but only if you get all A’s?” Talk about killing motivation.

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Why the Fragility of Health Outcomes Research May Be a Good Outcome for Health

• 1

By David Shaywitz, MD

Durably improving health is really, really hard.

I’ve discussed this in the context of drug discovery, which must contend with the ever-more-apparent reality that biology is incredibly complex, and science remarkably fragile.  I’ve discussed this in the context of patient behavior, focusing on the need to address what Sarah Cairns-Smith and I have termed the “behavior gap.”

Here, I’d like to focus on a third challenge: measuring and improving the quality of patient care.

I’ve previously highlighted the challenges faced by Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins in getting physicians to adhere to basic checklists, or to regularly do something as simple and as useful as washing hands, topics that have been discussed extensively and in a compelling fashion by Atul Gawande and others.

Several recent reports further highlight just how difficult it can be not only to improve quality but also to measure it.

Consider the recent JAMA article (abstract only) by Lindenauer et al. analyzing why the mortality rate of pneumonia seems to have dropped so dramatically from 2003-2009.  Originally, this had been attributed to a combination of quality initiatives (including a focus on processes of care) and clinical advances.  The new research, however, suggests a much more prosaic explanation: a change in the way hospitals assign diagnostic codes to patients; thus, while rates for hospitalization due to a primary diagnosis of pneumonia decreased by 27%, the rates for hospitalization for sepsis with a secondary diagnosis of pneumonia increased by 178%, as Sarrazin and Rosenthal highlight in an accompanying editorial (public access not available).

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Good Things in Medicine: A Shocking Development

• 7

By Rob Lamberts, MD

Sit down.

Really, sit down.  Trust me, please.  You are going to be shocked with the news I am going to give you and I don’t want any contusions, closed head injuries, street riots, or revolutions taking place in South American countries on my conscience.

Are you sitting?   OK, here it goes:

Medicare got something right.

Pretty crazy, right?  I am not sure if it was an accident, like the infinite monkeys typing on a keyboard producing the works of Shakespeare (they’d write all of the Harlequin romance novels too, by the way).  They had to eventually do something right, something that really benefits people, makes my life better, and potentially cuts cost.  The thing they got right?  The Medicare preventive exam.

Up to a year ago, the only way I would ever get paid to see a Medicare patient was when they had a problem.  If a person came in with the desire to keep from being sick, we would have to get a waiver signed and charge them full price.  So at those visits we would fish for any problems to justify it as a disease-management visit or one for acute care.  This meant that any prevention that I did perform on my Medicare patients had to be done on the side during problem-oriented visits.  So the motivation to do prevention was dependent on the nature of the doc; if they are OCD, didn’t care about getting home on time, or less concerned about getting paid, patients got better care, otherwise it was hit or miss.

Plus, the chart itself was often neglected.  Any time a doctor took to make the chart accurate was time away from other patients or time away from home.  This sounds petty, but it takes a large effort to keep things updated, and with the low reimbursement of primary care, only those things that were grossly inaccurate got corrected in most patients’ records.  I was never given the time to make sure the records were accurate.

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What Does Failure Mean?

• 2

By Aaron Carroll, MD

I’ve seen a number of responses to the news that the Medicare demonstration projects were not successful. Some have claimed that they were only demonstration projects, and the fact that some succeeded means we should look into those further. Others asserted that this once again proves that the government is incapable of making the health care system better.

As to the first point, it’s hard to get excited about this. By chance alone, a couple of programs were likely to save money. Four out of 34 reducing hospitalizations (when the best of them might have had inadequate data)? Hardly something to get excited about. Remember that two out of the 34 actually saw increased hospitalizations, too. I think it’s totally reasonable to think hard before just assuming there was something special about those four programs, and throwing more money at them.

But I think the latter point, made by Peter Suderman, is a bit of an over-reach as well. It’s important to remember that these were attempts by private hospitals and private physicians to change the way they care for patients. Granted, government was paying the insurance bills through Medicare, but this would have looked awfully similar if a private company had footed the bill. And, yes, private insurance companies have tried to use care coordination and disease management to reduce costs as well.

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