The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing to expand Medicare coverage for telehealth services and to make it easier for physicians to provide care through in-person home visits. The policy changes were floated in a proposed rule issued Thursday, regarding payment policies, rates and quality provisions for services provided under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule on or after Jan. 1, 2019.
Effective chronic disease management is imperative in a healthcare industry in which costs are only going up. However, without adequate patient engagement and care coordination strategies, efforts to mitigate chronic care issues will not be successful, leaving the market to handle ever-rising healthcare costs.
Healthcare organizations are stepping up to the plate when it comes to older adult care and chronic care management, according to a recent report from BDO Center for Healthcare Excellence & Innovation. The report, which was informed by an NEJM Catalyst survey, found that healthcare organizations are looking into home health services, strong chronic disease plans, and health IT to address the needs of a growing aging population.
Payers that implemented value-based payment models reduced healthcare costs by an average of 5.6 percent, improved provider collaboration, and created more impactful member engagement, according to a new study from Change Healthcare.
Until fairly recently, patient engagement was not a business imperative for hospitals. The importance of patient engagement has increased primarily because of two changes in the way Medicare pays healthcare providers—the advent of readmission penalties and the transition to value-based reimbursement.
A nurse is typically the first person a patient interacts with, and he or she can set the tone for the entire visit. This is especially crucial in treating patients with behavioral health conditions or addiction, as they may be afraid to open up about the situation, said Teresa Jacobson, project manager for the Holistic Health Integration Project in Clermont County, Ohio.
The Sustaining Healthcare Across Integrated Primary Care Efforts (SHAPE) demonstration, a Colorado project that integrated behavioral health services into primary care settings, saved about $1.08 million in net cost savings for Medicare, Medicaid and dual-eligible patients, according to a new report in Translational Behavioral Medicine.
Home health care visits that are longerby just one minutemay be tied to lower hospital readmission rates. That’s the keyfinding from a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
On Tuesday the CMS announced its first Rural Health Strategy, which looks to improve access to and quality of care in rural areas. CMS Administrator Seema Verma said the effort looks to “apply a rural lens to the vision and work of the agency” and was the culmination of input from rural providers and beneficiaries.
Since the 1960s when the hospice movement really began, we have been slowly changing our approach to management of chronic illness. With the addition of palliative care, a defined medical specialty since 2006, we have been able to take the lessons learned in that nearly 60 years of hospice experience and apply them to not only the terminally ill, but also for chronic disease management.
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