Grantees in the News

A recent Washington Post article described the benefits and potential pitfalls of the proliferation of retail clinics, which provide greater access to care but may challenge care continuity with a regular doctor.

In a commentary on pay-for-performance, The Incidental Economist featured findings from a study funded in-part by HCFO that evaluated Medicare’s Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (HVBP) program in its first year.

In a Vox editorial, Sarah Kliff reviewed the progress of Medicare’s Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (HVBP) program, which provides financial incentives for hospitals to improve medical care.

The Harvard School of Public Health featured a news story on reducing wasteful health care and mentioned efforts like the ABIM Foundation’s Choosing Wisely initiative, which encourages physicians, patients and other health care stakeholders to have conversations about medical tests and procedures that may be unnecessary and, in some instances, cause harm.

On the Kaiser Health News blog, Jordan Rau presented a “first look” at Medicare’s Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (HVBP) program. Rau cites findings from a study by Andrew Ryan, Ph.D., Weill Cornell Medical College, and colleagues that was the first to evaluate hospitals’ performance under the program.

The Washington Post featured findings from a recent study by David Dranove, Ph.D., Northwestern University, and colleagues on the recession’s impact on health care spending, which found that the recent recession accounted for most of the spending slowdown.

A recent Bloomberg News article described a major expansion of telemedicine in which WellPoint, Aetna, Inc., among other insurers are permitting online visits for initial consultations. Current HCFO grantee R. Adams Dudley, M.D., University of California, San Francisco, was quoted in the article describing the higher potential for misdiagnosis from online visits.

Former HCFO grantee Ateev Mehrotra, M.D., Harvard Medical School and the RAND Corporation, was quoted in a New York Times article that described the rise of urgent care centers and their potential for delivering both convenience and profit.

Recent HCFO grantee, James C. Robinson, Ph.D., University of California Berkeley, contributed an essay on reference pricing to the National Institute for Health Care Management’s Expert Voices series. In the essay, Robinson reviews evidence on the effectiveness of reference pricing to encourage consumers to make high-value choices as well as enhance competition in hospitals’ prices.

HCFO researcher Andrew Ryan, Ph.D., Weill Medical College of Cornell University, was quoted in InformationWeek regarding hospital responses to value-based payment strategies. He noted that while hospitals do respond to value-based payment, it is often in unexpected ways.