Peter A. Wadsworth (LinkedIn 8/8/2024)
Investing in healthcare quality initiatives is a cost-effective strategy for employers. This approach aims to maximize the value of their expenditures on employee health benefits.
March 14, 2024
The Better Healthcare Policy Group convened a meeting at the American College of Surgeons in Washington, DC, to catalyze discussions on the implementation of the Better Care Plan. The gathering included a diverse group of nearly 40 payers, employer coalitions, providers, patient advocates, patient safety and health quality professionals convening to discuss strategies to implement the Better Care Plan. Breakout sessions discussed key aspects of the Better Care Plan: value-based reimbursement strategies, certification and patient safety protocols and outcomes measurement and reporting.
BHCPG members at March 14 meeting (below from left to right): Jon M. Kingsdale, PhD., Dr. John Toussaint, Prof. Stephen M. Shortell, Allyson Y Schwartz, Gail Wilensky, PhD., George C. Halvorson, Peter A. Wadsworth, Prof. Richard M. Scheffler. For more information visit www.bhcpg.org.
Stephen M Shortell, , John S Toussaint, , George C Halvorson, Jon M Kingsdale, Richard M Scheffler, Allyson Y Schwartz, Peter A Wadsworth, Gail Wilensky
HealthAffairs Scholar 6/20/2023
The United States falls far short of its potential for delivering care that is effective, efficient, safe, timely, patient-centered, and equitable. We put forward the Better Care Plan, an overarching blueprint to address the flaws in our current system. The plan calls for continuously improving care, moving all payers to risk-adjusted prospective payment, and creating national entities for collecting, analyzing, and reporting patient safety and quality-of-care outcomes data. A number of recommendations are made to achieve these goals.
Peter A. Wadsworth, Stephen M. Shortell, John S. Toussaint
(Health Affairs Forefront 7/19/22)
In this article, we describe the rationale and design criteria for a public-private approach to improving the quality and value of health care in the United States: a Publicly Reported Health Outcomes (PRHO) program. This long-term, aspirational initiative, focused on results and transparency, will require both public- and private-sector action.
The US currently lags behind most Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality, and many other measures of mortality and morbidity. While many factors contribute to this quality gap, huge variations in health plan and hospital mortality rates suggest that US health outcomes could be substantially improved. In fact, recent research demonstrates that hospital mortality rates can vary by a factor of 3 to 1 and health plans by 4 to 1, and publicly available quality ratings of health care plans and services do not correlate well with outcomes. What is more, lack of transparency among health plans and provider organizations prevents purchasers from making informed choices based on relative quality of provider organizations and health plan networks. Currently available outcomes data are limited to Medicare fee-for-service.
Peter A. Wadsworth (LinkedIn 12/11/2020)
The Better Care Plan is a national health strategy to improve the affordability of health coverage and the quality of care received by Americans. It was developed by these eight senior healthcare executives, economists, and health policy researchers.
Medicare Advantage plans currently outperform Medicare fee-for-service (Parts A, B and D), and there is reason to believe that the performance gap will widen in the future as we enter “a golden age of healthcare” due to several trends:
There is ample evidence that offering plans similar to Medicare Advantage to Americans under age 65 will accelerate the adoption of these trends while reducing the per capita cost of care and improving health outcomes. While the Biden-Harris plan, if fully implemented, will likely address the problem of universal coverage, both public and private sectors will continue to experience growing healthcare expenditures. Only when the healthcare providers are paid to keep people well rather than providing more healthcare services will this paradigm change. The Better Care Plan is perhaps our best opportunity to begin to effect that paradigm shift.
Medicare-for-All Part II: A Risk assessment published on LinkedIn August 30, 2019.
There are substantial obstacles to MFA becoming law, which render MFA a high-risk proposition that could crowd out more moderate legislative proposals, include:
And there is considerable evidence that a multi-payer system, common in Europe, performs better than single payer systems and is a better fit for the American market.
This article compares Medicare-for-All with several alternatives including a public option, Medicare Extra for All, the Healthy America Program (revised) and Medicare Advantage for All using six criteria, such as universality of coverage, affordability, per capita costs and implementation time-frame. It concludes with seven recommendations, most notably nationalization of Medicaid and substantial changes to the way healthcare is organized and reimbursed. Published at LinkedIn
See also
Medicare-for-All Part II: A Risk assessment &
Medicare-for-All Part I: Financial Analysis
The MA Study Group has been formed to explore ways to extend prepaid medical care enhanced with 21st century technology to all Americans. The group currently consists of three health economists and three healthcare executives, who began a discussion group this summer.
Three California and two New York and two Illinois hospitals are among the top 10 U.S. hospitals with the lowest (best) Hospital Outcomes Death Scores. Other states represented include Texas, Michigan and Ohio. Hospital Outcomes Scores (HOS) have been developed by Amory Associates based on data submitted to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) by over 4,000 hospitals. For details, click the link below.
By Matt Banholzer, Ashish Chandarana, and David Straden
Executives can improve performance by mastering several practices and adopting a capital-portfolio-management system powered by a comprehensive digital application. READ MORE
