The full press release from HHS can be read here. A while back when reporting on the United campaign for doctors to enroll in their network I saw almost the same 
thing over a year ago with using the community numbers to try to show and help doctors with statistics to show them how they ranked in their communities against others. I don’t know how far this has gone as enrolling and contracting seemed to drop their rates of compensation with the contract, which I was told from a couple doctors I spoke with. The community performance was about the last thing on their minds.
HHS National Plan to Improve Health Literacy – Not Going To Happen Until We Focus on Using Technology (The Tool for Literacy) Which Includes Role Models at HHS And Other Places in Government
I spent about 5 minutes today looking at the neat heat map put out my Bing which was cool, but will probably never go there again to the Bing page for that information, but I will go back for the telescope, and that I am guessing is the same sentiment you will hear from others. In listening to the video below I found it interesting to hear the enthusiasm of the presenter for something that will mean little or nothing to the average individual and again we still have no role models that show any thing on the web about how Health IT is helping them, but come on, they just present the information that they want “those guys over there” to use – not going to happen as nobody cares as there are too many other immediate stressful items in life impacting lives.
This is all nice but in reality, who cares other than looking up information for either stimulus money or needing data for reports. For the average citizen who has little healthcare literacy, this means very little and we still have no role models. Nice graphs, Twitter involvement, but people have more interest in their own care and overall could care less about such statistics.
Biden Says Savings with Electronic Records are Big – Is He an ePatient? Let’s Get Personal Here As That is What We Want to Hear, Not the Same Old News of How Health IT Saves Money
Personally it’s hard for me to get excited about software from a company that underpaid physicians and patients for 15 years by using corrupted algorithms and is now paying back claims, not to mention all the money they made from the other insurance companies and the money they make from selling our medication data. HHS in my opinion might think about how and who they select as partners. One more new lawsuit filed last week that is a class action involving 3rd parties this time with outpatient facilities. The link below has some additional information on past and current legal lawsuits.
Outpatient Surgery Centers File Class Action Lawsuit Against UnitedHealth and Ingenix for Underpayments
One other recent action is the acquisition by Ingenix of the China Gateway company that already has ties to communication with the FDA, what is the purpose here I ask? Is it to bring more drugs and medical devices from China to keep the claim payments down versus our US companies? It’s another subsidiary of United Healthcare 2 steps down the ladder with I3 being a subsidiary of Ingenix.
UnitedHealth subsidiary (Ingenix Subsidiary I3) Acquires ChinaGate – Working to Sell Chinese Products Globally
I just look at companies as an entire entity and how they are combining all their different companies to work together, thus questions arise in my mind as to how all of this is going to play out and where do the resources and companies come into play here with “Reaching for the Top”.
There’s a lot of power in those algorithms and we need to look down the road to see where all the pieces fall into place. Community performance will take a back seat in anyone’s interest to the continued demise of the US economy and loss of jobs and outsourced services overseas. BD
Reach for the Top is in initial planning stages with support from Ingenix and IHI. It is designed to inspire improvements across three dimensions of care: the health of the population, the individual experience of care, and the cost of care -- what IHI calls the Triple Aim(TM). Reach for the Top will first enable communities to access information from a variety of sources, including commercial and government data, to gain an understanding of their current status by comparison in each of the three dimensions. Communities will then be able to monitor their improvement as they "Reach for the Top" on each metric, comparing results, seeking top performers and learning from best practices.
The Reach for the Top prototype demonstrated today uses information from Ingenix, IHI, the Dartmouth Atlas, County Health Rankings, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) to create indices and dashboards that enable communities to see how their performance ranks versus the top 10th percentile of communities in measures of community health -- such as birth weight, hospital admissions and re-admissions, emergency room visits, management of chronic conditions, patient-reported quality of life, and years of life lost to death prior to age 75 -- and in measures of cost, such as medical cost per person. Reach for the Top metrics will expand as more data become available. Efforts are currently underway to create a planning committee that will develop a competition for communities and hospitals to "Reach for the Top."
0 comments :
Post a Comment