Setting the Record Straight: Chronic Care Management CAN be Successful
Clearly, the need to reduce healthcare costs without affecting the quality of healthcare delivered is at the center of our country’s healthcare debate. However, a recent BusinessWeek article of February 4, 2010, by Chad Terhune and Arlene Weintraub, makes the mistake of lumping together all disease management programs and then goes on to cite examples in which particular programs have demonstrated no cost-savings nor any apparent increase in the health of patients.
That is not, however, true of all programs that aim to manage chronic disease and demonstrate reduced costs.
As a cardiologist and CEO of Pharos Innovations, a company that focuses on managing chronic disease while demonstrating real reductions in avoidable hospital admissions and overall healthcare costs for Medicaid, Medicare, the VA, commercial health plans and provider systems, I think it’s important to set the record straight. There ARE well-proven ways to reduce costs AND keep patients healthier.
Many of the programs cited in the article have several shortcomings: they are very human-resource intensive, expensive to deliver, episodic and intermittent and often removed from patients and their physicians.
However, by leveraging everyday technology that patients already have in their home, we at Pharos have developed a behavior change/remote patient monitoring platform that greatly reduces the HR costs negatively reflected in Mr. Terhune and Ms. Weintraub’s article. Moreover, Pharos, and others, has been involved in a number of not-so-well publicized Medicare and Medicaid demonstrations that consistently and reproducibly demonstrate sizable and sustainable reductions in hospitalizations and cost savings. Here are some quick highlights:
- As part of the CMS Physician Group Practice Demonstration, Park Nicollet Health Services and Billings Clinic utilize the Pharos platform for 2,000+ patients. Both have reduced hospital admissions by an estimated 50 percent and saved Medicare an estimated $3 million each.
- Some of our Country’s largest and most respected provider systems, such as Inova Health System and Henry Ford Medical Center, are using our platform and showing hospital admission reductions between 36 and 75 percent and increases in patient self-care with consistent reproducibility.
- Third-party validated data demonstrated that Iowa Medicaid Enterprise saved an estimated $13,000 in savings per Medicaid member and saw a 43 percent reduction in avoidable admissions.
These results have been validated and carefully scrutinized by third parties.
By integrating smarter and more consistently delivered approaches to care management into other national health improvement efforts, we can promote wellness while improving the efficiencies, effectiveness and reach of population health programs.
I cannot speak for the success of all disease management programs, but I can speak out on behalf of programs that have proven demonstrated success in increasing the health of patients, while decreasing the cost of caring for them.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not going to help our country reform healthcare. Rather, take a closer look at solutions that have been shown to reduce costs while increasing the health and quality of life of patients. And certainly these approaches should be given the opportunity to prove themselves on a larger scale.
Tags: Care management, CMS, Disease management, Health plan, Medicaid, Medicare, Population Health, Remote Patient Monitoring
