Saturday, May 28, 2011

Second Smallest State Chooses to be First

The 49th populous state, Vermont, is the first state to sign into law a single payor health care system. The system still needs to be designed but is slotted to begin in 2014.  According to the NYT, all 600k residents would be eligible for the system.  Vermont has about 200k uninsured/underinsured.  The state plan is called Green Mountain Care.

A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound

From the Commonwealth Fund (Health Care Costs 101)

Thursday, May 26, 2011

It's Good for You, It's good for Me

Sutter Health, serving Northern California, has joined 15 other health systems in the High Value Healthcare Collaborative (HVHC).  The goal is to improve health care, lower costs, and move best practices out to the national provider community. According to today's press release, HVHC will focus on nine increasingly prevalent treatment areas that have a wide variation in rates, costs and outcomes. They include total knee replacement, diabetes, asthma, hip surgery, heart failure, perinatal care, depression, spine surgery and weight-loss surgery.

Why are such efforts important?  You'd think that if there was an effective treatment for specific illness that everyone would get that treatment.  Right?  But that happens only about 50% of the time, according to the Quality Alliance.  Also, patients have different outcomes and are charged different rates depending on where the patient lives, which doctors and hospitals provide their health care, and their racial/ethnic status.

Now, the reasons for this situation are probably many and are not currently known.  Hopefully, the HVHC, by sharing real-life data, will begin to develop some answers to these questions that have been dogging US Healthcare for over 30 years.

See the Quality Alliance website for more information.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Organizational Innovation

I came across a brief article out of Duke University.  The authors suggest that healthcare organizations must hurdle the tendency for mature organizations to maintain the status quo.  In addition, healthcare organizations operate in a highly regulatory environment that inhibits innovative delivery of care. To achieve organizational innovation senior leaders must be dynamic and regulations will need to be modified.  “Sacred cows” will have to be sacrificed.  What’s that you say? I couldn’t hear you, I was listening to my 8-track.