Tag: Incentives

Hey CEOs, Want to $ave Cash? Here’s What Few See

Nov 1, 2018

By Darrell Moon

In my last post, I described the nightmare that CEOs in America face when dealing with employee health costs, which have become the third-largest expense in business. I also promised to outline the simple steps that CEOs can take to rein in these spiraling health costs.

My first suggestion is to employ a tried and true management technique that every CEO learned in business school — one that gets economic incentives working for you rather than against you. I’m referring to the old adage: If you want to achieve a business objective — be it launching a new product or reducing employee health costs — you need to incentivize your managers to help you succeed.

Yet, I doubt there’s a CEO in America who offers bonuses or other incentive pay to the HR and benefits managers who can most effectively reduce these crippling employee health costs.

Why not? Isn’t that just basic Management 101?

Ironically, incentivizing your HR and benefits managers doesn’t cost you any money, it doesn’t require an outside consultant, and it can happen in a matter of minutes regardless of the size of your company. Just tell your HR and benefits managers that if they manage to reduce employee claims costs or the cost of your company health plan (but not its benefits), you’ll give them a financial reward.

Giving a piece of any savings in health costs to the people who can make it happen is just common sense — no different in essence from paying a higher commission to your best salespeople.

Expensive Hospitals: The Enemy Within

Oct 1, 2018• 18

By ANISH KOKA MD

Everyone agrees that health care is bankrupting the nation. The prevailing winds have carried the argument that a system that pays per unit of health care delivered and thus favors volume over value is responsible. The problem, you see, was the doctors. They were just incentivized to do too much. This incontrovertible fact was the basis for changes in the healthcare system that favored hospital employment and have made the salaried physician the new normal. Yet, health care costs remain ascendant.

Why?

It turns out overutilization in the US healthcare system isn’t what its cracked up to be.

Figure 1. Utilization rates in different health care systems

A recent analysis (Figure 1) by Papanicolas et al., in JAMA demonstrates that while the United States is no slouch with regards to volume of imaging and procedures in a variety of different categories, it does not explain a health care system twice as expensive as its nearest competitor. The problem turns out not to be volume, rather its the unit price of healthcare in the United States.

Health Care Costs and Glass Houses

There are many stones cast by all the various players in healthcare when it comes to cost, and of course, everyone bears some degree of responsibility, but it’s also clear that some folks live in larger glass houses than others. The most beautiful of all the glass houses are those built by hospitals. From 1996 to 2013, it was not population growth, health status, doctors visits, or prescription drugs that drove spending increases. Sixty-three percent of the increase in cost over an almost 20-year time span can be attributed to hospital stays and testing during doctor visits. Consider that the average hospital stay in the US costs $18,142, and lasts 4.9 days compared to other industrialized countries where average hospital stays last 7.7 days, and cost $6,222. But despite these exorbitant prices hospital systems in the United States complain they barely stay afloat.

Why Smart Pill Bottles and Financial Rewards Don’t Improve Medication Adherence

Aug 9, 2017• 10

By HILARY HATCH

A study published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine showed financial rewards and connected pill bottles don’t work. One explanation suggests that “other patient concerns about potential adverse effects of these medications, such as impotence or fatigue, were not targeted by this engagement strategy.”

What?!!!!!??

How can a patient engagement strategy not target the patient’s concerns? Isn’t that the very definition of patient engagement? Impotence and fatigue are a big deal to most people. Would an extra $15 a week compel you to take a medication that made you impotent? $150 a week? Would a pulsating pill bottle in your cabinet get you to swallow a pill that made you feel foggy and tired all day?

We can’t incent or remind someone to do something they never agreed to or intended to do. It would be like Amazon pinging you to buy something you would never consider adding to your cart. Amazon nudges you to buy things that you would put in your cart or things you saved to your cart, but never purchased. Why aren’t we as laser-focused on what matters to patients?

Value-Based Health

Mar 11, 2015• 36

By CYNDY NAYER

In recent weeks, the market has reacted to a few noteworthy headlines, all involved with or touching upon value-based discretionary actions, and many with the not-so-hidden question: What’s In It for Me or WIIFM?

CMS announced that by 2016 30% of fees in health care should be paid for through a value-based system, moving away from fee-for-service.
ACO results have shown ambivalent outcomes.
Outcomes-based contracts have permeated the Hepatitis C cost-nado (that’s a cost sharknado, the kind that fiercely defies cost controls and takes over all noise about payment reform and patient preferences).
Reference-based pricing is a good/bad troublemaker in the middle of the value-based travails.

The latest rampages have appeared on two national and highly-regarded blogs: The Health Care Blog [Value-Based Reform] and The Health Affairs Blog [Go Slow on Reference Pricing].

As one of the loudest proponents on value-based designs, I lift the curtain again to show the thinking behind the movement from fee for service to value-based designs. All of these items above discuss the message of payment reform, or system alignment, but they are intensely linked to the patient-consumer ability to make the right choices, choose the right sites for care, and pay the right amount for services rendered to achieve health security.

This last—health security—should be at the heart of the US health system.

▪      It’s the place where patient competency is built and tested over time, as the patient becomes aware of health risks and chooses to modify behaviors to lower the risk.
▪      It’s the place where, when there are acute or emergent symptoms, there is no question but that the patient will be able to access the appropriate and affordable care in the safest possible setting, hopefully receiving care that delivers the patient back to functional health.
▪      It’s the place where caregivers and administrators are paid a competitive wage for serving the needs of the patient and getting the patient back to the best health possible.

The Value of Workplace Health Promotion (Wellness) Programs

Dec 22, 2014• 27

By RON GOETZEL

The recent Health Affairs Blog post by Al Lewis, Vik Khanna, and Shana Montrose titled, “Workplace Wellness Produces No Savings” has triggered much interest and media attention. It highlights the controversy surrounding the value of workplace health promotion programs that 22 authors addressed in an article published in the September 2014 issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine titled, “Do Workplace Health Promotion (Wellness) Programs Work?” That article also inspired several follow-up discussions and media reports, including one published by New York Times columnists Frakt and Carroll who answered the above question with: “usually not.”

There are certainly many points of contention and areas for continued discussion on this topic. It turns out that Lewis et al. and I agree on many things, and there are other areas where we see things differently.Continue reading…

A Deeper Dive into the Rio Grande Valley

Oct 4, 2014• 8

FARZAD MOSTASHARI, MD

Last week, Dr. Bob Kocher and I took to the pages of the New York Times to detail a health care success story in Southern Texas. In a region once featured for its extreme health care costs and poor health outcomes, a group of physicians motivated by new incentives in the Affordable Care Act has started to change the equation. The Rio Grande Valley ACO Health Providers achieved eye-popping savings in their first year – coming in $20 million below its Medicare baseline and receiving reimbursements totaling over $11 million while also achieving better health outcomes for its patient population.

The savings number made for an impressive headline.

But as is often the case, other information had to be left on the cutting room floor. We dive a little deeper into the RGV ACO below:

The Central Role of Information Technology

Dr. Jose Pena, Chief Medical Director of the Rio Grande Valley ACO, emphasizes that one of the first and most difficult tasks for the newly-formed organization was developing an IT infrastructure that would serve their needs. “Using what was there wasn’t really an option,” says Dr. Pena, “so we built our own infrastructure.”

Forgoing a single EHR solution, the Rio Grande Valley now operates on a mix of cloud and office-based systems. The ACO developed software to identify metrics from various EHR systems, migrate that information to the cloud, and view real-time performance of providers. “IT accounted for 40% of our costs,” says Dr. Pena, “but the importance of proper reporting – to our leadership team, and to CMS – was at the top of our list.” The ACO identifies its customized IT system as foundational to its success.

Should Health Consumers Be Paid for Performance Too?

Jun 2, 2014• 23

By MICHELLE SNYDER

Meaningful Use and Pay for Performance – two of the most talked about programs in healthcare IT over the past several years. They are both based on the premise that if you want to drive behavior change among providers and improve quality of care, you need to offer financial rewards to get results.

But what about the consumer? We have now entered a new era in healthcare where the consumer is rightfully front and center – AHIP is even calling 2014 the “Year of the Consumer.” Payers, and other population health managers, who until recently viewed consumers as claims, now want to “engage,” “motivate” and “delight” them.

The challenge, however, is that we are giving consumers more responsibility, but not making them accountable for the quality of care they provide for themselves.

As a country we have spent tens of billions of dollars on Meaningful Use incentives and Pay for Performance programs for clinicians. Providers need to demonstrate they are making the best choices for patients, being efficient and coordinating care.

They need to educate patients and give them access to information based on the belief that if patients are informed, they will take responsibility and action. Unfortunately, this seems like a “Field of Dreams” spinoff – “If we say it, they will act.”

However, that movie has a different ending. The intentions are good, but the flaw is that consumers don’t simply need more information. They need personalized guidance and support, and they need to feel like they have a financial stake in the game.

So the big question is – why aren’t we spending more time thinking about how the concepts behind “meaningful use” and “pay for performance” could be used as a way to get consumers engaged in their health? Yes, clinicians are important as they direct approximately 80 percent of the healthcare spend in our “sick-care” health system.

However, what most people do not realize is that 75 percent of healthcare costs are driven by preventable conditions like heart disease and type-2 diabetes. And while some consumers may throw up their hands and blame genetics for the majority of their health issues, it’s a fact that 50 percent of what makes us healthy is under our control – as opposed to 20 percent for genetics.

So what if we made wearable technologies such as FitBit more “meaningful” for the consumer? Instead of just tracking steps, what if consumers were financially rewarded for taking steps to improve their health (pun intended) through health premium reductions, copay waivers or even gift cards?

Consider a scenario where an individual who was identified as being pre-diabetic and then took action to prevent the onset of diabetes. What if we required that proactive person to pay less in premiums than someone who was not taking any initiative to improve their health? That would clearly be very motivating.

Rebooting Primary Care From the Bottom Up

Apr 16, 2014• 53

By Zubin Damania, MD

For the better part of a decade, I practiced inpatient hospital medicine at a large academic center (the name isn’t important, but it rhymes with Afghanistan…ford).

I used to play a game with the med students and housestaff: let’s estimate how many of our inpatients actually didn’t need hospitalization, had they simply received effective outpatient preventative care. Over the years, our totals were almost never less than 50%.

For my fellow math-challenged Americans: that’s ONE HALF! Clearly, if there were actually were any incentives to prevent disease, they sure as heck weren’t working.

In a country whose care pyramid is upside down—more specialists than primary care docs, really?—we’re squandering our physical, emotional, and economic health while spending more per capita than anyone else. Four percent of our healthcare dollars go towards primary care, with much of the remaining 95% paying for the failure of primary care. (The missing 1%? Doritos.)

Worse still, the oppressive weight of our non-system’s dysfunction falls disproportionately on the shoulders of our primary care providers—the very instruments of our potential salvation. To them, there’s little solace (and plenty of administrative intrusion) in the top-down reform efforts of accountable care organizations and “certified” patient-centered medical homes.

But what about a bottom-up, more organic effort to reboot healthcare? A focus on restoring the primacy of human relationships to medicine, empowering patients and providers alike to become potent, positive levers on a 2.8 trillion dollar economy? What if we could spend twice as much on effective, preventative primary care and still pull off a net savings in overall costs, improvements in quality, and increased patient satisfaction?

What if George Lucas had just quit after the original Star Wars series? Wouldn’t the world have been better without Jar Jar Binks?

While the latter question is truly speculative, the former ones aren’t. We’re trying to answer them in Las Vegas (hey now, I’m being serious) at Turntable Health, where we’ve partnered with Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle and Cambridge, MA based Iora Health.

We aim to get primary care right by doing the following:

Continue reading…

ACA 101: An Employer’s Search for Objective Advice

Apr 10, 2014• 14

By Michael Turpin

In ancient Athens, the philosopher Diogenes wandered the daylight markets holding a lantern, looking for what he termed, “an honest man.”

It seems since the dawn of the consumer economy that customers and buyers have traded most heavily on a single currency – trust.

Three millennia later, our financial system still hinges on the basic premise that the game is not rigged and any trusted intermediary is defined by a practitioner who puts his client’s interests ahead of his own.

Anyone responsible for procurement of healthcare may feel like a modern-day Diogenes as they wander an increasingly complex market in search of transparent partners and aligned interests. The art of managing medical costs will continue to be a zero-sum game where higher profit margins are achieved at the expense of uninformed purchasers.

It’s often in the shadowed areas of rules-based regulation and in between the fine print of complex financial arrangements that higher profits are made.

Are employers too disengaged and outmatched to manage their healthcare expenditures?

Are the myriad intermediaries that serve as their sentinels, administrators and care managers benefiting or getting hurt by our current system’s lack of transparency and its deficit of information?

An Obamacare Fine on Overweight Americans: Discriminatory and Ineffective

Mar 25, 2014• 50

By STEPHEN SOUMERAI

Amid the rancorous debates over the Affordable Care Act, one provision deserves to be getting serious discussion.

It’s a provision that allows employers to increase the amount that they may fine their employees for “lifestyle” conditions, such as being overweight or having high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

Almost 37% of Americans are overweight or obese. The supposed goal is to use financial penalties to reduce obesity, the health costs of which exceed $200 billion per year. But this idea, while well intended, will not help Americans suffering from obesity, a medically defined disease and disability. In fact, it will likely make their situation worse.

For years, the country’s “wellness” industry has offered health-enhancement and obesity-reduction programs to corporations, from gym memberships to dietary counseling. For obesity, this approach has not worked. Research on these programs shows that they have not significantly reduced weight or cholesterol levels, or improved any other health outcomes.

Even the most successful programs, such as Weight Watchers, achieve an average two-year weight loss of only about 3% for their members— and even that tiny weight loss often returns later.