Hospitals Turn to Community Health Workers to Prevent Readmissions
It’s a new twist on an old concept: employ peers of low-income patients to go out into the community and work with those recently hospitalized to ensure that they are getting the care and assistance they need to recover from [...]
Low Participation Plagues Dual-Eligibles Demo
A federal demonstration program that seeks to improve care for those eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid is suffering from under-participation. This perspective was presented during last week’s meeting of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, the independent federal agency that [...]
Safety Net Still Needed, Study Finds
Despite Affordable Care Act policies that have enabled millions of Americans to obtain health insurance, the health care safety net is still needed. Or so concludes a new report from the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute’s Center on Health Insurance [...]
MedPAC Addresses Issues at April Meeting
Last week the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission met in Washington, D.C. On its agenda were the following issues on which MedPAC is advising Congress: the development of a unified prospective payment system for post-acute care improving Medicare Part D Medicare [...]
Academy Offers Practices to Improve Care for Disadvantaged Patients
The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine has published a new report that acknowledges the challenges faced by hospitals that care for socio-economically challenged patients and offers suggestions for how to serve those patients more effectively. The report, Systems [...]
New Approaches to Readmissions Reduction Program?
While Medicare’s readmissions reduction program has produced a decline in the number of Medicare readmissions within 30 days of discharge, critics – among them the National Association of Urban Hospitals – argue that the program is unfair to hospitals that [...]
Safety-Net Hospitals’ Readmissions Challenge
The March edition of the journal Health Affairs offers a compelling snapshot of a type of patient many private safety-net hospitals serve on an almost daily basis: the “superutilizer” who lacks the ability and resources to address his own medical [...]
Keys to Increasing Medicaid Enrollment
States that have their own health insurance marketplace enroll a higher proportion of Medicaid-eligible residents in their Medicaid programs. And those that rely on the federal marketplace enroll higher proportions of eligible residents in Medicaid if they let the federal [...]
Group Organizes Advocacy in Support of 340B Program
Under pressure from federal regulators and MedPAC, the advocacy group 340B Health is attempting to rally hospital groups behind the 340B prescription drug discount program that requires pharmaceutical companies to provide discounts to qualified hospitals for drugs dispensed on an [...]
Medicaid Expansion Would Help With Behavioral Health
If the 20 states that have not expanded their Medicaid programs were to do so, an estimated 1.9 million Americans with behavioral health problems would have access to care they currently do not receive. This is the conclusion of a [...]
