PQRS ReportingQualified Clinical Data Registry Reporting
December 16, 2014

Season’s Greetings from CMS: You Owe 1.5 Percent for a PQRS Reporting Failure

‘Tis the season to be jolly—unless your health care organization is one of many last week that received a letter from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) informing you that at least one of your providers was eligible to participate in PQRS in 2013, but failed to do so—and that a penalty is coming in 2015. Those who did not successfully report at least one PQRS measure in 2013 will only be reimbursed 98.5 percent on all allowable 2015 Medicare Part B charges—a 1.5 percent cut.   Ready or Not, the Penalties Were Based on 2013 PQRS Reporting…
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Population HealthPQRS Reporting
December 9, 2014

How to Energize Your Providers to Measure and Improve Outcomes

It’s no wonder that so many physicians feel threatened by the mention of outcomes measurement. All too often, outcomes are used as a club to punish providers who seem to weaken overall group performance. Or outcomes are packaged and applied in a way that doesn’t provide actionable information—which can seem like a waste of everyone’s time and resources. To engage your providers—and get the real benefit from this form of health care data analysis—try to link your efforts to measure and improve outcomes with an iterative process of inquiry into best practices. Why Outcomes Measurement Can Seem Misleading Measuring patient…
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Population HealthPQRS Reporting
December 2, 2014

No More Blame Game: How to Use Patient Outcomes Measurement to Boost Quality and Provider Performance

Fair or not, if your patients don’t do well, your physicians can be tagged as poorly performing providers. But there are ways to change the dynamic for your organization by effectively using patient outcomes measurement to structure and drive a quality program that benefits both patients and providers. Tracking the health and status of patients—“how patients do”—is the Holy Grail of quality measurement. Despite the fact that it is very difficult to identify a direct cause and effect between provider action and patient outcomes, quality programs are shifting the emphasis to patient outcomes and attributing performance to physicians. This is…
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Future of Health CareResearch
November 25, 2014

Health Care 2014: Where Do We Go from Here?

This week, many of us will sit around Thanksgiving tables, giving thanks for our families and friends, food and shelter, and living in this good land. We might also say, this land where we have access to some of the best health care on earth. So how interesting that we have spent the last several years waging war on every part of health care—the building of it, buying it, paying for it, measuring its value and delivering it. How did we get here? Have we lost trust in health care as we’ve lost trust in government? Or, perhaps there is…
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Medical EducationPopulation HealthResearch
October 28, 2014

The Missing Dimension of Residencies That Will Affect Your Program’s Future

Residency programs need to change. I write this as a former family medicine residency program director who spent much of my professional life teaching residents and medical students. Specifically, residency programs need to get on track in the value-based health care world. To fail to do so is to become obsolete. Here‘s the problem: Like most residency programs, our teaching focused on individual patients, in both the office or in the hospital. While we treated specific conditions and used protocols, however, we never evaluated performance of a patient population, particularly over an extended time frame. Quality Measurement is Now Central…
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