AT THIS HOUR

March 25, 2022 —

135M: The amount the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Protection Act, which was signed into law last week, will provide to support the mental health of healthcare workers. The bill was named in honor of Dr. Lorna Breen, the ER Director at NY-Presbyterian Hospital who died by suicide in April 2020. She was one of many frontline healthcare workers who struggled with their mental health during the COVID pandemic. “Physicians are at a significantly increased risk of suicide compared to the general population, with suicide rates 40% higher in males and 130% higher in females,” Dr. Madara, CEO of the American Medical Association, said.

Philly’s Social Health Experiment: Independence Blue Cross, AmeriHealth Caritas, Penn Medicine and other payers and health systems are partnering to launch a multiyear initiative aimed at combating health disparities throughout Philadelphia County, which consistently ranks last out of the state’s 67 counties in quality of life, health factors, clinical care, and social and economic factors. The initiative, dubbed Accelerate Health Equity, will form pilot programs and measure progress through a publicly available digital data dashboard. 

The Color Purple Twist: Turquoise Health is an online tool that now allows patients to compare prices for many hospital services launched in beta development stage this month. The platform uses cost data from machine-readable files that hospitals were supposed to have made public due to the federal price transparency rule that went into effect in January 2021. Many hospitals have not yet so Turquoise Health also issues a scorecard for hospitals based on their compliance with the rule.

Sharing Savings: “We set up a shared savings arrangement with a PT practice that handles all our total hip, knee replacements and many of the ankle and shoulder procedures too – they get 20% of the savings on the TJRs and 15% on the arthroscopies and other procedures. We realized that the quality of PTs was wide ranging so we picked one that got patients to goal faster and did extra things like screening and response to potential addiction. Our payment was north of $350K for a 6-month period vs. the initial cost target, so the PT practice got a share of that” – Allen Kent, a practice manager in Northeast

Three’s No Crowd For Kidney Care:  Three companies - Fresenius Health Partners, Cricket Health (the tech company offering a kidney care patient engagement and data), plus kidney care physician organization InterWell Health - are forming an independent entity that will use digital tools and value-based care to serve patients with chronic kidney disease. The organization will take on the InterWell Health name and aims to reach 270,000 kidney disease patients by 2025.

Benefits Brokerage Tool: Nava, a benefits brokerage, launched a free, publicly available benefits search engine last week. The company's benefits search engine allows employers to search for digital-friendly benefits across 28 categories including telehealth, mental health and addiction. The platform verifies all vendors, more than 600, and lists their information and reviews. Through the platform, Nava hopes new, digital-first vendors will have a way of getting out to market, and employers will be able to better select or at least narrow down their options.

Extra Point: My 14-year-old picked up dozens of tennis balls during tryouts this week by stacking them in a pyramid on his racket the way we taught him when he was a toddler.  The balls used to just roll off from the weight of the racket and balls in his little ~4 year old hands, but they didn’t this week as our freshman showed some value to the coach beyond just being able to hit a ball over the net.  Like Tommy, I was struck this week by the growing emphasis on paying some of the youngest healthcare providers for their value, including the litany of new in-home, behavioral health, or virtual models.  Insurers like Regence BCBS in the northwest says about ~45-50% of their member’s claims flow through some 130 value-based arrangements, a source said, and increasingly these arrangements aren’t just the domain of the veteran practices. Rob Selden, who works on value based contracts for a local plan in Indiana, told me last week that “these arrangements often pay $5, $10 or $20 per patient per month just to handhold the riskier patients or do preventive work, but they aren’t just for primary care doctors.  You can get my attention in a lot of other ways, like checking if patients understand their treatment plan for asthma, managing where they go for therapy or picking up the ball where the hospital or doctor leaves off.”  That’s sort of a good guide for healthcare providers looking to explore these arrangements – it will serve you well, and it’s serving kids like Tommy well in getting the right kind of attention from the coach. -BC

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