Hennepin County Medical Center, Minnesota's biggest public hospital, has named Arthur Gonzalez, a healthcare executive from California, as its new chief executive officer. He replaces Lynn Abrahamsen, who is retiring. Gonzalez was chief executive of Tri-City Healthcare District, a public healthcare system in Oceanside, CA. He takes over July 1.
With pressure mounting from the White House to cut back on soaring healthcare costs, an aide to Florida Sen. Bill Nelson said that the senator is seriously concerned such reductions could damage patient care in places such as Miami, where costs are among the highest in the nation. In addition, at a Miami press conference several political and healthcare leaders said reducing costs was crucial if the Obama administration was going to advance its plans for reform. "It has to be done everywhere," said Miami Mayor Manny Diaz.
The Medical College of Georgia will learn this month whether it received permission from a national accrediting agency to open a campus in Athens to help meet the state's demand for more physicians. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education will decide whether the Medical College's School of Medicine can expand its entering class by 40 students starting in August 2010. Georgia ranks 39th in the nation in the number of doctors per resident, according to the Georgia Board of Physician Workforce.
In this op-ed piece from the New York Times, three healthcare experts say that while most medical travelers seek cosmetic procedures, an increasing number have high-risk operations like heart surgery and joint replacement in places like India, Singapore, and Thailand. The only way to determine of this is a good idea is to find out how foreign hospitals and surgeons compare with their American counterparts in terms of cost and quality, the authors say.
Black women in Washington, DC, suffer from obesity, diabetes, heart disease and generally poor health in alarmingly high numbers, and white women do not, according to a study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The study said there is a large disparity in the incidence of certain chronic diseases between black and white women. Kaiser's study was based on data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the federal Current Population Survey from 2004 to 2006.
Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein says that if we really want to fix America's healthcare system, what really matters is changing the ways doctors practice medicine, individually and collectively. Everything else is "just tinkering at the margin," he says.
Medical device company ev3 Inc. announced it agreed to buy technology company Chestnut Medical Technologies Inc. for up to $150 million in cash and stock. Ev3 will pay $75 million upfront for Chestnut, with 30% to 40% of that total being paid in stock. It expects the deal for the privately held company to close within 45 days.
A Colorado physician was sentenced to nine months in jail for prescribing an antidepressant over the Internet to a California teenager who later committed suicide. San Mateo County prosecutors charged psychiatrist Christian Hageseth III, MD, of Fort Collins, CO, with a single felony count of practicing medicine without a valid California license.
A consortium of health plans in Minnesota is rolling out a Web-based system that will let providers submit insurance claims electronically to comply with a July 15 legislative deadline. The Minnesota Council of Health Plans tapped Infotech Global Inc. to power the system, called MN E-Connect, which serves as a Web portal that lets providers file medical, hospital, and dental claims.
Efforts to measure and improve physician performances nationwide have gained momentum--particularly as a way to encourage consumers to be more active participants in their health and healthcare decisions. However, more needs to be done to build on these efforts to improve quality care and to recognize those physicians who provide that care, according to a new commentary published by the Center for Studying Health System Change.
For the most part, health plans have marketed physician performance in the form of physician-ranking programs or some type of tiered or high performance provider networks, said author Debra Draper, PhD, a senior fellow at the HSC. Nationwide, these programs operate under a variety of names, such as the Aexcel Specialist Network (Aetna), Blue Precision (Blue Cross Blue Shield), Care Network (CIGNA), Preferred Network (Humana), and Premium Designation Program (UnitedHealthcare).
The idea of these initiatives is to provide "a systematic and objective method of measuring physician performance" that use plans' claims or other administrative data, Draper said.
However, the results often are only used to inform consumers or, in some cases, give consumers incentives (such as reduced copayments) to use higher performing physicians. "Plans rarely pay bonuses to physicians they deem high performing," she said.
Also, while most physician performance measurement programs may seem similar, they vary in their methodologies, Draper said. The methodologies often can differ on the specific measures used, sample size requirements, and the comparative emphasis placed on quality vs. cost measures.
"Consequently, gauging the comparability of individual plan results is difficult because the decision algorithm each plan uses to conduct the assessments is proprietary with little--if any--transparency," she said.
Sometimes, this variability in performance measurement data can result in some physicians being deemed high-performing in one plan but not another, as was the case, for example, of one large integrated delivery system in Seattle.
Although most plans typically require a minimum sample size to assess a physician's performance, these thresholds tend to be set relatively low (e.g., fewer than a dozen patients). This is related in part to limitations associated with an individual plan's use of only their own claims data to conduct the assessment.
However, since any single plan's patients may represent a fraction of a physician's entire patient panel, the likelihood is greater that the assessment may yield incomplete--if not erroneous--results. For instance, if a plan's patients are disproportionately sicker with higher costs of care than the physician's overall patient panel, the plan's assessment might show the physician as a poor performer, when the opposite may be true.
When looking for results, the physicians themselves need to be kept in mind. Effective support should be in place for physicians willing to improve, and "robust rewards" should be available for physicians demonstrating good results, she said.
Otherwise, as data suggests, it will "be difficult if not impossible" to engage physicians in the performance measurement process. The support and rewards "have to be of value" to physicians to avoid distraction by competing demand, Draper said.
And, although the challenges are formidable, "failure to take the appropriate steps to improve the current state of physician performance measurement may result in a lost opportunity to improve the quality and efficiency of the underperforming U.S. healthcare system," she said.
