Articles
Workforce, Physician Issues
Redefining the Physician’s Role as Care Team Leader
With training and support, physicians can become effective team leaders.
Board Composition and Selection, Performance improvement
Getting Strategic about Shared Decision Making
Boards can foster patient-centered care by encouraging meaningful conversations during patient encounters and by incentivizing clinicians.
Financial Oversight, Financial Management
New payment models: Are you ready?
When describing how care delivery differs under value-based payment versus traditional fee for service, Douglas Pogue, M.D., points to the way physicians’ mindsets are changing in the BJC Accountable Care Organization.
Governance Effectiveness, Legislation and Legislative Advocacy, Physician Fee Schedule (PFS)/MACRA/QPP
Quality Payment Program, Year 2
In January, physicians and other eligible clinicians began their second year of Medicare’s Quality Payment Program, established by the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. The overarching goal of QPP remains the same: tying clinician payment to performance on quality and cost metrics.
Legislation and Legislative Advocacy, Physician Fee Schedule (PFS)/MACRA/QPP, Care Delivery, Quality & Patient Safety
The key to new payment programs? Data management.
Value-based payment approaches, including Medicare’s Quality Payment Program for physicians and other eligible clinicians, tie fees and bonuses to how well providers perform on various quality and cost measures. An underlying assumption of value-based payment is that quality of care can be easily measured and reported. In reality, however, performance measurement is still evolving.
Legislation and Legislative Advocacy, Physician Fee Schedule (PFS)/MACRA/QPP, Physician Workforce, Workforce, Reimbursement
Reimbursement reform: Educating physicians
Established by the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, the Quality Payment Program ties physician payment more closely to performance.
Physician Leaders, Care Delivery
Reining in drug costs
When Cleveland Clinic launched an initiative to control drug costs, Jeff Rosner, senior director of pharmacy contracting and purchasing, was skeptical. Knowing the pharmaceutical marketplace as he did, he was uncertain whether the academic medical center could significantly reduce its skyrocketing drug costs.
Get Involved, Leadership, Nurses, Workforce
Nurse as CEO: A unique fit
On her first day of work in September at Florida’s Memorial Hospital Miramar, Grisel Fernandez-Bravo, R.N., was given a hospital ID badge displaying her new title: chief executive officer. But Fernandez-Bravo felt that something was missing. So she attached a badge buddy that says “Nurse.”
“Someone came up to me and said, ‘You’re CEO now. You have to take that badge buddy off,’ she says. “But I won’t take it off. I’ll always be a nurse first.”
Legislation and Legislative Advocacy, Physician Fee Schedule (PFS)/MACRA/QPP, Rural issues, Strategic Planning
Rural hospital takes advanced payment path
A rural Oregon hospital, Sky Lakes Medical Center, is jumping into the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Advanced Alternative Payment Models, which are the elite track of Medicare’s new clinician payment system, the Quality Payment Program. Providers in Advanced APMs must be capable of managing sizable financial risk in exchange for 5 percent incentive payments.
As David and Goliath stories go, this one involves not just one giant but two. The 176-bed Sky Lakes, in Klamath Falls, will be participating in two Advanced APMs in 2017:
Legislation and Legislative Advocacy, Physician Fee Schedule (PFS)/MACRA/QPP, Rural issues, Strategic Planning
What rural hospitals need to know about MACRA
Trustee talking points
- The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has rolled out a new Medicare physician payment system. The system will affect payment starting in 2019, with data reporting beginning in 2017.
- Leaders of small rural hospitals believe success under Medicare’s Quality Payment Program looks a lot like success under value-based population health.
- Many small rural providers, including Rural Health Clinics, Federally Qualified Health Centers and clinicians with low volumes of Medicare patients, are exempt fro