Posts Tagged ‘Remote Patient Monitoring’

Setting the Record Straight: Chronic Care Management CAN be Successful

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

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. Read the rest of this entry →

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Posted in Chronic Care Management | No Comments »

The Medicare Medical Home Demonstration: Crawling Out From Under the Rock – Part II

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Table of contents for Medicare's Medical Home Challenge

  1. The Medicare Medical Home Demonstration: Crawling Out From Under the Rock – Part II
On August 4th, 2009, my fellow blogger (and mentor), Vince Kuraitis of Better Health Technologies, wrote a guest post on the topic of the Medical Home. His premise was simple: as currently conceived, the CMS Medical Home demonstration, called MMHD, is doomed to failure because it will NOT SAVE MONEY!

Vince’s post begs the question: “So…if one were to redesign the MMHD to fulfill the potential for both improving care quality (through access to an appropriate “Medical Home”) while simultaneously reducing healthcare costs, where might we start?”

Vince points us in the right direction in his post, calling our attention to the work of Randall Brown in his report of another CMS demonstration, the Care Coordination Demonstration. Brown points out two key observations:

1. Care Coordination, to save money, must start with the “right” population target; and,

2. Care Coordination interventions can only save money if they don’t COST more than about $120 per participant per month (the amount likely to be saved from a well-designed intervention).

In other words, the solution to the dilemma has two aspects: 1. FOCUS and 2. EXECUTION. Read the rest of this entry →

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Posted in Chronic Care Management, The Patient Centered Medical Home Model | 3 Comments »

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