The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services today announced Medicare beneficiary premiums for Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D prescription drug plans. It’s good news. The next step will be for CMS to announce beneficiary premiums and other cost sharing amounts for traditional Medicare Parts A and B. The Medicare open season begins on October 15.
The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is celebrating its 20th anniversary.
After spending the last 18 months listening to patients, systems leaders, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders, we have identified the following three challenges that are front and center in the minds of healthcare experts, and which require long-term strategies to address.
Improving care for Americans living with multiple chronic conditions (MCC) —
More than 25 percent of Americans live with MCCs, including 80 percent of Medicare beneficiaries. Care for these patients is often fragmented, leading to poor outcomes and increased costs. We stand ready to support a multifaceted initiative designed to augment primary care and leverage AHRQ’s core competencies in health systems research, practice improvement, and data and analytics.
Providing data and analytics to policymakers to empower informed decision making — Many policymakers still make decisions based largely on expert opinion rather than tapping into the explosive potential of new data resources and analytic strategies. We plan to transform the delivery of vital information by establishing an integrated data and analytics platform, one to help Federal, State, and local policymakers get access to timely and accurate data and analytic resources to make informed policy decisions. Central to this effort will be continued expansion of AHRQ’s premier data resources—the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project.
Reducing diagnostic errors — An estimated 12 million people per year are affected by diagnostic errors, including 4 million suffering serious harm. Research suggests the cost to the U.S. healthcare system exceeds $100 billion annually. Our initial work should focus on the three largest areas of diagnostic errors: cancer, vascular conditions, and infections.
Kaiser Health News reports on how local healthcare authorities are using data to help reduce suicide rates. For example,
data revealed a surprising number of suicides at hotels and motels. It also showed a number of those who killed themselves had experienced eviction or foreclosure or had a medical visit within weeks or days of their death. It revealed that people in crisis regularly turn their pets over to the animal shelter.
But what to do with that information? Experts have long believed that suicide is preventable, and there are evidence-based programs to train people how to identify and respond to folks in crisis and direct them to help. That’s where Debra Darmata, Washington County’s [Oregon] suicide prevention coordinator, comes in. Part of Darmata’s job involves running these training programs, which she described as like CPR but for mental health.
The training is typically offered to people like counselors, educators or pastors. But with the new data, the county realized they were missing people who may have been the last to see the decedents alive. They began offering the training to motel clerks and housekeepers, animal shelter workers, pain clinic staffers and more.
Bravo.