MediCaring Blog: Purchasing Value- Not Yet Right for Medicare’s Frail Elders Resource Library February 26, 20150 Republished with permission from: http://medicaring.org/2015/02/25/purchasing-value/ By Joanne Lynn In late January, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell announced that Medicare would purchase most services on the basis of value rather than volume, aiming for 90% of fee-for-service payments by 2018 [http://www.hhs.gov/blog/2015/01/26/progress-towards-better-care-smarter-spending-healthier-people.html]. Of course, paying on the basis
MediCaring Blog: Protecting Hospitals That Improve Population Health Resource Library January 28, 2015September 12, 20180 Republished with permission from: http://medicaring.org/2015/01/26/evaluation-flaws/ by Stephen F. Jencks, M.D., M.P.H. [Also see companion post by Joanne Lynn, M.D.] Issue. The Medicare Readmission Reduction Program (MRRP) encourages hospitals to reduce readmissions within 30 days of discharge by imposing substantial financial penalties on hospitals with more readmissions than would be expected if the same patients
MediCaring Blog: CMS CCTP Metrics Have Serious Flaws Methods News January 28, 2015March 2, 20201 by Joanne Lynn (Republished with permission) The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has quietly put out two evaluations of the readmissions work-- and both documents are remarkable for their failure to evaluate the programs fairly or to provide insights as to what works in what circumstances. The Community-Based Care Transitions
ProPublica Prescriber Checkup Data Sources July 3, 20140 ProPublica Prescriber Checkup provides prescribing data from Medicare's prescription drug benefit, known as Part D. The data for 2011 includes nearly 1.2 billion prescriptions by 1.6 million doctors, nurses, and other providers. The database lists about 364,000 of those providers who wrote 50 or more prescriptions for at
Medicare.gov Hospital Compare Data Sources May 21, 20140 Hospital Compare has information about the quality of care for over 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals across the country. Hospital Compare can be used to find hospitals and compare the quality of their care. The information on Hospital Compare can help patients make decisions about where to get their healthcare,
CMS Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data: Inpatient Data Sources May 20, 2014December 18, 20190 That data provided in this source include hospital-specific charges for the more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals that receive Medicare Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) payments for the top 100 most frequently billed discharges, paid under Medicare based on a rate per discharge using the Medicare Severity Diagnosis Related Group (MS-DRG)