Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs)

See the following -

HHS CTO Susannah Fox on Health Datapalooza

Every spring, our team in the HHS IDEA Lab gears up for our biggest event of the year: the Health Datapalooza. It’s an annual celebration of the power of data that was started by my predecessor, Todd Park, in 2010. This year, we were honored to hear from an extraordinary lineup of leaders from private industry, academia and the federal government, including Vice President Biden. I thought I’d share excerpts from three of my colleagues’ speeches, to give people a sense of the scope and depth of the discussions.

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How A Simple New Tool Helps Doctors Care For Patients -- After They Leave The Office

Lisa Wirthman | Forbes | May 11, 2016

We live in an increasingly connected world, but patients who receive treatment from multiple doctors and healthcare systems still face a lack of coordination in their care, which can put their health outcomes at risk. PatientPing is working to help doctors collaborate and create a more consistent experience for patients with simple technology that connects healthcare providers across facilities, systems and geographies...

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Interoperability Hurdles Impede ACOs

Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | January 20, 2016

For accountable care organizations, a lack of interoperability between their health information technology systems and those of providers outside their ACO is the No. 1 challenge they face, cited by 79% of respondents to a survey of 68 ACOs by group purchaser and performance-improvement company Premier and health IT collaborative eHealth Initiative...

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J P Systems Expands Clinical Data Quality and Interoperability Improvement Services

Press Release | J P Systems, Inc. | December 11, 2018

Doctors are increasingly demanding more context to frame the clinical data they see in EHRs. This context must come from having more complete patient records. When multiple external providers are involved in patient care, data often arrives in the form of clinical documents called CDAs (Clinical Document Architecture). Typically, much of the data in these CDA files is miscoded, misplaced or missing. The danger of bad data is a clear risk to hospitals. These CDA files are generated automatically and in many cases no one is looking at the contents. J P Systems can help reduce risk by increasing the data quality in CDAs exported by the hospital's EHR system.

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Nurses Launch New Campaign To Alert Public To Dangers Of Medical Technology And More

Press Release | National Nurses United | May 13, 2014

Nurses Launch New Campaign to Alert Public to Dangers of Medical Technology and Erosion of Care Standards

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Open Health Round-Up For 2014: Notable Articles, Reports, And Events

Even the hidebound field of health care can undergo a lot of change over the course of one year. Key health IT trends that I saw throughout 2014 are summarized in another article. Here I'll list some of the most notable articles and reports related to open source, standards, and transparency in health. Read More »

Population Health in Crisis: The Blind Leading the Blind

Deborah Leyva, RN, MSHIDeborah Leyva, RN, MSHI | LinkedIn Pulse | August 13, 2016

Everything you may know about Population Health (PH) is wrong. I wrote about the complexities associated with PH in the ACO Survival Guide (the Guide). The Guide describes the moving parts necessary to succeed using the accountable care model including data analytics, care coordination, quality metrics and, of course, a deep understanding of HHS' evolving reimbursement regulations. Certainly, any knowledgeable observer could review the Guide and conclude that the ACO model was fraught with complexity and there were plenty of opportunities for false starts and outright failures, potentially costing an organization tens of millions of dollars...

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Population Health Management Becoming a Priority for Providers, but Many Struggle With Stop-Gap Solutions and Lack of Infrastructure, Says Latest Black Book Survey

Press Release | Black Book Market Research | January 30, 2017

Black Book’s most recent report on the state of population health management (PHM) reveals that it is among the fastest-growing areas in the healthcare IT space and several effective end-to-end solutions emerging. Record PHM spending underscores its increasing importance with a reported $8B invested in digital health in sum in 2016, with the majority going to population health and patient experience tools. But even as PHM solutions are quickly becoming a priority for healthcare organizations, in Q1 2017, 81% of providers are tackling population health projects without a strategic technology purchase that meets all their needs...

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Public Health Tech: The Future of Health Tech You Never Heard Of

Marquesa Finch, MPH | The Doctor Weighs In | January 29, 2017

Digital Health has experienced a glorious boom in the last decade and is expected to reach $379.3 Billion by 2024 with 25% of the growth occurring between 2016 and 2024. Patient management can now be done on user-friendly platforms; physicians can remotely monitor their patients with mobile devices and telemedicine; and personal trackers and genetic testing are allowing patients easier access to their own health data. Clearly, we understand the kind of power technology has on improving the delivery of care and management of disease...

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Ransford Health To Offer NexJ Connected Wellness To American Accountable Care Organizations

Press Release | Ransford Health, NexJ Systems | January 21, 2014

NexJ Systems Inc. (TSX: NXJ), a provider of cloud-based software delivering enterprise solutions to the financial services, insurance, and healthcare industries, today announced that Ransford Health will begin offering NexJ Connected Wellness to Healthcare Systems and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) as part of its efforts to help them realize shared savings and improved outcomes through patient activation. Read More »

RWJF Awards Grant to PatientsLikeMe to Develop New Measures for Healthcare Performance

Press Release | PatientsLikeMe, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Quality Forum | December 8, 2015

PatientsLikeMe has been awarded a $900,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to help jumpstart changes that will amplify the patient voice in the measurement of healthcare performance. “We have an abundance of clinical measures, but we need to better incorporate the voice of the patient into performance measurement” A portion of the grant funds a collaboration between PatientsLikeMe and the National Quality Forum (NQF) to develop, test and facilitate the broader use of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) to assess patient-reported health status. 

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Scenarios for Health Care Reform (Part 2 of 2)

Andy Oram | EMR and HIPAA | May 18, 2017

Some health care providers balk at the requirement to share data, but their legal and marketing teams explain that they have been doing it for years already with companies whose motives are less commendable. Increasingly, the providers are won over. The analytics service appeals particularly to small, rural, and safety-net providers. Hammered by payment cuts and growing needs among their populations, they are on the edge of going out of business and grasp the service as their last chance to stay in the black...

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Starting An ACO With '24 Different EMRs'

Mike Miliard | Healthcare IT News | March 4, 2014

One CIO offers perspective on making nearly two-dozen different systems talk with each other Read More »

Telehealth Groups Ask Burwell For Relief

Tom Sullivan, | Government Health IT | June 11, 2014

A group of telemedicine and mHealth associations have reminded the new HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell that $36 billion in healthcare costs could be saved with remote monitoring -- providing better care, reduced hospitalizations and readmissions, complication avoidance and improved satisfaction among chronically ill patients...

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The Quality Payment Program Final Rule

Many people have asked me to review the Quality Payment Program final rule, released on October 14, 2016. Several summaries have already been written but your best bet is to rely on the CMS Quality Payment Program website at https://qpp.cms.gov. Yes, the rule is still complex - over 2400 pages, of which more than 50% is the mandated response to comments made on the proposed rule.  The good news is that CMS has been very responsive to feedback, creating a transition plan for adoption, reducing the number of criteria and extending the timeline which enables iterative learning before large scale implementation. Under the Quality Payment Program, clinicians have two approaches to choose from for reimbursement:  the Merit-based Incentive program (MIPS) and Advanced Alternative Payment Models (APMs)...