D.C. Insiders, HM Leaders Urge Hospitalists to Stay in Fight to Achieve Quality in Era of Reform
Political analyst Norm Ornstein, PhD, told thousands of hospitalists to “buckle up” and expect a wild ride this election season.
Jin Park, MD, is worried. She worries about the health of her patients, her hospital, and her HM group. She frets that the U.S. healthcare system will be too slow to implement must-needed change—the kind of national transformation that will improve care, contain costs, and eliminate political jousting.
“I’m a doctor with more than a decade of experience; I don’t have a personal concern. I have a community concern, a societal concern,” says Dr. Park, one of 17 hospitalists at Adventist Health in Portland, Ore. “I think adversity is good, and given the magnetism of the change, I feel like only the monsters are going to be able to survive. But you can’t just have the Kaiser [Permanentes] and the Monarch [Healthcares] and all these other examples take over the entire country. I mean, that’s not going to happen, right?”
Dr. Park wasn’t the only anxious hospitalist at HM12, held last month at the San Diego Convention Center. She and more than 150 others listened to SHM Public Policy Committee Chair Ron Greeno, MD, MHM, explain in detail the Accountable Care Organization (ACO) program being ramped up by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Dr. Greeno, chief medical officer for Brentwood, Tenn.-based Cogent HMG, outlined how ACOs are designed to change the healthcare payment paradigm.
“They want to change doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, everybody that provides healthcare, from being profit centers to being cost centers,” Dr. Greeno said. “Right now, we’re profit centers. We do something, we get paid; we don’t do it, we don’t get paid. You see a patient, you get paid for that; your hospital admits a patient, you get paid for that. They’re a profit center. Under a [capitation] methodology, everything’s flipped on its head. If we admit a patient, we have to pay for that. We use those dollars; we’re now a cost center.”
For hospitalists, he added, that means making themselves more valuable by providing cost-effective care that translates into a healthier population.
More than 3,000 people attended HM12 in San Diego. HM13 will be May 16-19, 2013, in Washington, D.C.
On the Horizon: Systematic Change
While payment reform was a central theme of the annual meeting, another main takeaway was the shift of Medicare from a payor for quantity (fee-for-service) to a payor for quality (value-based purchasing).
It’s “systematically linking quality to payment,” said Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, FAAP, SFHM, a pediatric hospitalist, chief medical officer of CMS, and director of the Office of Clinical Standards and Quality at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. “We are transitioning to a more value-based purchaser, an active purchaser, and a catalyst for health system change. Our aims: better care for individuals, better health for populations, and lower cost for improvement.”
One in 3 Americans uses Medicare or Medicaid, the nation’s largest provider of healthcare coverage. And that number could rise when health exchanges launch in 2014 as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Dr. Conway said. Combined, the two agencies spend about $800 billion annually. Medicare alone spends more than $1.5 billion per day.
Dr. Conway acknowledged the difficulty in changing the system, especially at the “ground level.” In addition to outlining key CMS’ initiatives, he indicated one of the main goals of his position is to “learn how to scale and spread successful interventions.”
They want to change doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, everybody that provides healthcare, from being profit centers to being cost centers.
—Ron Greeno, MD, MHM
