Embraced by some provider groups and disparaged by others, CMS’s five new payment models for practices focused on primary care include much to consider. All reflect a key departure of Medicare’s Value-Based Health Care (VBHC) efforts to date: they are direct efforts by Medicare to transition physician practice revenues to risk without the necessity of […]
Do “Women’s Health Centers” and Services Deliver on Value-Based Health Care?
Women make an astounding 80 percent of health care decisions for themselves and their families. But there’s a disconnect between what women need and how providers have organized health care for them. While Value-Based Health Care (VBHC) is struggling to achieve more value for every health care dollar spent, providers are simultaneously sabotaging women in […]
When Women Call Out Medical Gaslighting, Providers Lose the Whole Family
A smart business would not deliberately blame customers for needing their services or accuse them of spinning fictions. A business dependent on customer loyalty and engagement for their success—and what business doesn’t?—would normally pay close attention to customer concerns in social and mainstream media. All the more so in health care, where the needs are […]
Women with Autoimmune Diseases Fight Uphill Battle on Every Health Care Front
Our articles on women’s health care issues have focused on areas that must change in order to provide better quality and outcomes, to lower costs, to advance treatment, and to treat women respectfully and equitably as patients and providers. We have demonstrated how women have been sidelined from getting the right health care because of […]
Women’s Health Research Needs an Infusion: How Health Systems and ACOs Should Help Correct Gender Disparities
Women receive health care that is below par, and the consequences are unnecessary morbidity and death. It is fact, not fiction—borne out by significant data that reveal disparities across many major conditions—that inattention to women’s unique symptoms, risk factors, disease biology and treatment effects are causing harm to women. Despite the reality, a poor body […]
How Gender Discrimination Against Women Physicians Handicaps Value and Patient Care
We need to get women’s health care right. This is not a parochial issue, important only to women, and disconnected from Value-Based Health Care. Gender disparity in health care is real, with significant ramifications for outcomes—for the patients, certainly, as well as for providers’ ability to succeed under risk. Just as quality measurement is necessary […]
Providers, Take Note: Prepare for the Future Health Care of Older Women
Our review of women’s health care has called attention to disparities in risk factors and biological disease differences, treatment variances, and lack of adequate research. Gender and race have obscured perceptions of women’s symptoms, creating delays in diagnoses and treatments and even early death. A serious gap in gender-specific research and gender-analyzed data contributes to […]
Providers, Take Note: Prepare for the Future Health Care of Older Women
Our review of women’s health care has called attention to disparities in risk factors and biological disease differences, treatment variances, and lack of adequate research. Gender and race have obscured perceptions of women’s symptoms, creating delays in diagnoses and treatments and even early death. A serious gap in gender-specific research and gender-analyzed data contributes to […]
Higher Risks, Worse Disease, Fewer Choices: Health Care Fails African American Women the Most
No matter how we measure disparity in health care for women in the U.S, African American women stand out. Across the board, they have higher risk factors for disease and poorer outcomes, including much higher mortality for many conditions. African American women contract cardiac disease and cancer at a younger age and, often, in worse […]
Silent, Deadly Heart Disease in Women: How Population Health Can Help
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death among women. But we hardly talk about it. Indeed, CVD offers a remarkable lesson about complex, broad-based gender disparity that contributes to poorer health care for women. For acute myocardial infarctions (AMI or heart attacks) in particular, sex-specific health risk factors, disease variants tied to gender […]