Leaders in medicine and health policy are focusing on a new component of care: appropriateness. Only those medical services and interventions that are likely to help and not harm the patient and that represent value (cost/quality) are appropriate. The real issue is, of course, knowing which services are appropriate.
The Choosing Wisely® campaign, an initiative of the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation, aims to promote conversations between physicians and patients by helping patients choose care that is:
Supported by evidence
Not duplicative of other tests or procedures already received
Free from harm
Truly necessary
In response to this challenge, more than 40 national organizations including the American Society of Anesthesiologists have stepped up to the ABIM Foundation’s invitation and identified one or more sets of five tests or procedures commonly used in their field the appropriateness of which should be questioned and discussed with patients. The resulting lists of “Five Things...
Securing the Future for Anesthesia PracticesAs the health care world continues to evolve, offering new technological advances and business models, along with changing laws and regulations, it’s imperative to keep informed. Anesthesiologists, Practice Administrators, CRNAs and others in the anesthesia marketplace now have a great new option when looking to attend a conference on anesthesia practice management: The Advanced Institute for Anesthesia Practice Management.The Advanced Institute for Anesthesia Practice Management is an exciting new conference with new sponsors and a fabulous new venue. Previously known as the Anesthesia Billing & Practice Management Seminar, this new name reflects our commitment to position our conference as the premier educational opportunity for decision makers of anesthesia practices, including Anesthesiologists and Practice Administrators. The conference will take place at the hottest property on the Las Vegas Strip, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, from April 11-13, 2014.The Advanced Institute for Anesthesia Practice Management offers the anesthesia...
No three-word phrase was heard more frequently than “Perioperative Surgical Home” (PSH) at the ASA Practice Management Conference held in Dallas on January 24-26, 2013.
The PSH is ASA’s response to the triple-aim challenge laid down by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement: (1) improving the experience of care, (2) improving the health of populations and (3) reducing per capita costs of health care. “The PSH,” according to ASA, “is an innovative model that will improve patient care and health care delivery, and reduce costs by implementing a seamless continuity of care from the moment surgery is planned, through recovery and discharge from a medical facility and beyond.”
The PSH model is based on the Patient-Centered Medical Home, the purpose of which is to address the fragmentation of chronic disease management by having a single primary care physician coordinate the patient’s care and engage a team of professionals and the patient in an...
Just mention endoscopy at an anesthesia conference and see what happens. Few topics elicit such strong but disparate responses. For the anesthesiologist from the East endoscopy has been, and continues to be, his or her fastest growing and most profitable line of business. By contrast, the prevailing view of the physician in the West reflects a very high degree of skepticism. His experience is that the endoscopists don’t really want to work with his group. He interprets payer policy as forcing anesthesia through the same funnel of denial as other services and sees no meaningful light at the end of the tunnel, especially with regard to endoscopy. Such is the challenge to today’s anesthesia practice management: sorting out the realities of facility expectations, surgeon preferences, payer policies and economic realities and, most of all, rising above the prejudice of emotions. Cynicism and the weight of disappointment too often cloud our ability...
After requesting comments from the public in August 2013 and receiving more than 130 letters, CMS is going forward with modification of its policy on disclosure of physician payment information.
Starting in late March of this year, CMS will evaluate requests for individual physician payment information (or requests for information that combined with other publicly available information could be used to determine total Medicare payments to a physician) on a case-by-case basis under the Freedom of Information Act. In addition, CMS will generate and make available aggregate data sets regarding Medicare physician services for public consumption.
The notice that CMS posted to its official blog on January 14th represents a reversal of policy going back to 1980. The original policy was based on an injunction issued by a federal district court in Florida that barred the government from disclosing identifiable annual Medicare payments to individual physicians. When the district court vacated its injunction...