Cartoon – I think it was an election year
Monthly Archives: October 2016
Cartoon – Productive Leadership Meetings
Cartoon – The Point of Having an Opinion
7 Core Behaviors for Honorable Leadership – Does This Include Everything?
7 Core Behaviors for Honorable Leadership – Does This Include Everything?
“7 Core Behaviors for Honorable Leadership” – does the Honor Code include all the important elements for a foundation of honorable leadership?
1. Tell the truth even when it’s difficult. Avoid duplicity and deceitful behavior.
2. Treat others with dignity and respect. Take the lead, and show value to others.
3. Keep your word and your commitments. Ask for relief sooner than later if necessary.
4. Be ethical. Operate within the laws of the land, the guidelines of your profession, and the policies of your employer.
5. Act responsibly; do your duty, and be accountable. Own your mistakes, and work to do better in the future.
6. Be courageous. Lean into the pain of your fears to do what you know is right even when it feels unnatural or uncomfortable.
7. Live your values. Be faithful to your spiritual core, your conscience, and your deepest intuitions.
FTC puts an end to Penn State-PinnacleHealth deal
http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/finance/ftc-prevails-squelching-penn-pinnaclehealth-deal
Thanks to the Federal Trade Commission, the Penn State Health and PinnacleHealth merger will not go forward.
Plans to merge were called off late last week, according to PennLive.com. The Penn State Board of Trustees voted unanimously to call off the deal, which would have created a four-hospital system in the Harrisburg region, including Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center and the three PinnacleHealth facilities.
The FTC and the Pennsylvania Attorney General intervened in the deal late last year, with both claiming that residents in Central Pennsylvania would have few alternatives for other healthcare providers, leaving the likelihood open that the merged entity would raise prices. Thetransaction was initially approved by a U.S. District Court in May, but the parties were dealt a blow when the ruling was reversed by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals last month.
The aborted deal cost Penn State an estimated $17.6 million in legal fees and other costs, according to PennLive.
The case is part of what has been heightened scrutiny of recent hospitals deals by both federal and state regulators. In November, the FTC intervened in a deal between two rural hospitals in West Virginia, Cabell Huntington Hospital and St. Mary’s Medical Center. The agency recently prevailed in a 2010 case where it intervened in ProMedica’s acquisition of St. Luke’s Medical Center in Toledo, Ohio. The agency is also fighting a proposed merger between Advocate Health Care and NorthShore University HealthSystem in Chicago, although as in the Penn State matter, it has lost at the lower court level.
FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez expressed concern earlier this year that ongoing hospital mergers will soon impact healthcare pricing around the U.S., but deal-making appears to go on unabated. That’s despite the fact that a recent analysis suggested that mergers even across markets can lead to double-digit cost increases.
Editor’s Corner: Lack of preventive care in the US may hurt hospitals
Bold statements are fairly rare from the heads of large hospital systems, but Robert Ostrowsky, the head of RWJBarnabas Health, made a pretty strong assertion in a recent interview with the Asbury Park Press: Hospitals should keep their communities healthy. But they don’t.
“It’s not easy because no one is willing to pay for that right now, meaning I don’t get reimbursed by insurance companies to keep somebody healthy and the government doesn’t seem to want to pay us to keep someone healthy,” Ostrowsky told the publication. “They all prefer to pay us when someone gets sick and they want us to spend less when that person is sick. That’s where the concentration has been. But an ounce of prevention. If they would take X number of dollars and say, ‘Here, use it to keep people healthy,’ actuarially, that will show you eventually spend less on sickness care.”
That needs to change for a variety of reasons that have begun to cascade into something profound. Princeton economist Alan Krueger has recently published a study (.pdf) showing a strong correlation between poor health and lack of workforce participation.
Are Blues’ Plans Benefitting Unfairly From Program To Offset Cost Of Sicker Patients?
Are Blues’ Plans Benefiting Unfairly From Program To Offset Cost Of Sicker Patients?
Some health insurers say they’re paying too much to rival Blue Cross Blue Shield plans under a key pillar of the federal health law designed to compensate insurers that take on sicker and more expensive patients.
The critics’ chief complaint is that the Affordable Care Act’s risk-adjustment program unfairly rewards health plans — including Blue Shield of California — that have excess administrative costs and higher premiums. That comes at the expense of more efficient, lower-priced plans in the individual market, they say.
Measuring What Really Matters
http://altarum.org/health-policy-blog/measuring-what-really-matters
Not everything that is important for a person’s health can be measured and not everything that can be measured in health care is important to the average person.
For too long, value has been defined only for the benefit of regulators and purchasers. Our health care system is purpose-built to cater to their performance needs, oversight, and expectations, and as such has fostered the proliferation of all sorts of clinical quality measures by multiple organizations. The current state of quality measurement serves these audiences reasonably well.
However, the problem with evaluating quality using these tools is twofold. First as a physician, I still see too much variation in the technical quality of American health care. Second, clinical measures alone ignore how value is perceived through the eyes of those who actually use the delivery system. When we look at the highest users of health care – those with serious medical problems and functional limitations – we now have an abundance of technical measures for each condition on their problem list, and yet really no understanding of whether we are contributing to a person’s quality of life. Frankly, I care little about the fact that my 100-year-old grandmother has never had a screening colonoscopy, but I care mightily that no one seems responsible for her successful discharge and transition home after a bout of urosepsis.
We cannot improve what we do not measure…and it is time to start measuring health care from the vantage point of those needing care, not just for those who provide and pay for it. And if we are to achieve the dramatic improvements anticipated through new payment and service delivery models, the mushrooming of purely clinical measures must be thinned out to make room for a new generation of metrics that consider outcomes from the person’s perspective.
Cartoon – Our Company Values
Cartoon – That only matters if
HENRY KOTULA 