Cartoon – Importance of Improving Communications
Cartoon – Recruiting Expectations
Cartoon – Downgraded Expectations
Cartoon – Managing Expectations
Consolidation as a force for good—at least during COVID
https://mailchi.mp/b0535f4b12b6/the-weekly-gist-march-12-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
| When Jeff Goldsmith and Ian Morrison talk, people listen (apologies to E.F. Hutton…Goldsmith and Morrison are old enough to get that reference, anyway). These two lions of health policy and strategy came together recently to pen an editorial in Health Affairs examining the impact of large integrated health systems on the nation’s response to COVID-19. Morrison and Goldsmith admit to often finding themselves on opposite sides of consolidation issue, but looking back over the past year, both agree the scale systems have built over decades has been foundational to their effective and rapid response to the pandemic, which they rate as “better than just about any other element of our society”. Larger health systems were able to mobilize the resources to secure protective gear as supplies dwindled. They responded at a speed many would have thought impossible, doubling ICU capacity in a matter of days, and shifting care to telemedicine, implementing their five-year digital strategies during the last two weeks of March. This kind of innovation would have been impossible without the investments in IT and electronic records enabled by scale—but systems also exhibited an impressive degree of “systemness”, making important decisions quickly, and mobilizing across regional footprints. Given the financial stresses experienced by smaller providers, consolidation is sure to increase. And the Biden healthcare team will likely bring more scrutiny to health system mergers. Morrison and Goldsmith urge regulators to reconsider the role of health systems. The government should continue to pursue truly anticompetitive behavior that raises employer and consumer prices. But lawmakers should focus less on the sheer size of health systems and rather on their behavior, considering the potential societal impact a combined system might deliver—and creating policy that takes into account the role health systems have played in bolstering our public health infrastructure. |
9 numbers that show how big Walmart’s role in healthcare is
Walmart has continued to grow its presence in healthcare over the past few years, with expansions of its primary care clinics and the launch of its new insurance arm.
Here are nine numbers that show how big Walmart is in healthcare and how it plans to grow:
Walmart has opened 20 standalone healthcare centers and plans to open at least 15 more in 2021. The health centers offer primary care, urgent care, labs, counseling and other services.
Walmart’s board approved a plan in 2018 to scale to 4,000 clinics by 2029. However, that plan is in flux as the retail giant may be rolling back its clinic strategy, according to a February Insider report.
Walmart in January confirmed plans to offer COVID-19 vaccines in 11 states and Puerto Rico.
In 2020, Walmart established 600 COVID-19 testing sites.
Walmart said it believes expanding its standalone clinics will help bring affordable, quality healthcare to more Americans because 90 percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store.
The Walmart Health model lowers the cost of delivering healthcare services by about 40 percent for patients, according to Walmart’s former health and wellness president Sean Slovenski.
In October, Walmart partnered with Medicare Advantage insurer Clover Health on its first health insurance plans, which will be available to 500,000 people in eight Georgia counties.
Walmart’s insurance arm, Walmart Insurance Services, partnered with eight payers during the Medicare open enrollment period in 2020 to sell its Medicare products. Humana, UnitedHealthcre and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield were among the insurers offering the products.
Back to “a deal for every doc”?
https://mailchi.mp/b0535f4b12b6/the-weekly-gist-march-12-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
Many physician practices weathered 2020 better than they would have predicted last spring. We had anticipated many doctors would look to health systems or payers for support, but the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans kept practices going until patient volume returned. But as they now see an end to the pandemic, many doctors are experiencing a new round of uncertainty about the future. Post-pandemic fatigue, coupled with a long-anticipated wave of retiring Baby Boomer partners, is leading many more independent practices to consider their options. And layered on top of this, private equity investors are injecting a ton of money into the physician market, extending offers that leave some doctors feeling, according to one doctor we spoke with, that “you’d have to be an idiot to say no to a deal this good”.
2021 is already shaping up to be a record year for physician practice deals. But some of our recent conversations made us wonder if we had time-traveled back to the early 2000s, when hospital-physician partnerships were dominated by bespoke financial arrangements aimed at securing call coverage and referrals. Some health system leaders are flustered by specialist practices wanting a quick response to an investor proposal. Hospitals worry the joint ventures or co-management agreements that seemed to work well for years may not be enough, and wonder if they should begin recruiting new doctors or courting competitors, “just in case” current partners might jump ship for a better deal.
In contrast to other areas of strategy, where a ten-year vision can guide today’s decisions, it has always been hard for health systems to take the long view with physician partnerships.
When most “strategies” are really just responses to the fires of the day, health systems run the risk of relationships devolving to mere economic terms. Health systems may find themselves once again with a messy patchwork of doctors aligned by contractual relationships, rather than a tight network of physician partners who can work together to move care forward.
The false metric of “lives under management”
https://mailchi.mp/b0535f4b12b6/the-weekly-gist-march-12-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
“We’ve fully embraced value-based care,” we often hear from health system executives. “We don’t just measure inpatient admissions anymore—now we focus on ‘lives touched’.” Indeed, the proliferation of shared savings schemes, quality-based bonus payments, and the like has refocused traditional hospital leaders on a broader set of performance metrics.
But there’s some fuzzy math going on here. When we hear an executive boast that their system has “more than half our payments at risk”, our first question is, what kind of risk? A hypothetical, but very common, example, illustrates the point: if $100 of reimbursement has a $1 quality bonus attached to it, that’s often counted as $101 of “revenue at risk”. Nonsense!
As the lines blur between insurance companies and providers, and health systems aspire to move up the value chain, embracing risk for the health of the patients they serve, the real question shouldn’t be how many lives are under management, but rather how much management those lives are under.
Taking on greater responsibility for managing not just the total cost of care, but the total health of each individual patient, should be the strategic goal of systems looking to become fully “integrated”—depth matters more than breadth when it comes to managing care. That’s where the incentives really change, and decisions about what care should be delivered when, to whom, and how, become powerful drivers of a system’s economics.
We’d encourage health systems to fully embrace accountability for the health of their patients, and not to be satisfied with merely earning performance-based bonus payments.
A year later, consumer confidence is returning
https://mailchi.mp/b0535f4b12b6/the-weekly-gist-march-12-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
After a rollercoaster year of living with COVID-19, consumer confidence has returned—and remained largely stable during the winter surge of the pandemic, according to the latest data from a Healthgrades’ consumer attitudes and behavior survey.
The graphic above depicts Healthgrades’ “Consumer Comfort Index”, a measure based on survey questions that assess comfort in specific healthcare settings (e.g., visiting your primary care doctor) and “everyday activities” (e.g., going grocery shopping or dining inside a restaurant). The index reveals that consumers continue to feel more comfortable with in-person medical-related activities than most everyday activities, with 65 percent now feeling comfortable in healthcare settings—up from 40 percent last April. There are, however, some obvious “everyday” outliers: for example, people still feel more comfortable going to the grocery store than getting an in-office medical procedure.
A second survey, by Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock and Public Opinion Strategies, finds consumers are much more willing to seek in-person medical care in the next six months as compared to last summer. Health systems and physicians should leverage this return of consumer confidence to reach out to patients who have delayed or missed screenings and other important care across the past year.
The ARP comes to the rescue of the ACA, for now
https://mailchi.mp/b0535f4b12b6/the-weekly-gist-march-12-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
On Thursday, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act of 2021 into law, committing nearly $1.9T of federal spending to boost the nation’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to direct payments to American families, extension of unemployment benefits, several anti-poverty measures, and aid to state and local governments, the plan also contains several key healthcare measures.
Approved by Congress on a near party-line vote using the budget reconciliation process, the law includes the broadest expansion of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) to date. It extends subsidies for upper-middle income individuals to purchase coverage on the Obamacare exchanges, caps premiums for those higher earners at a substantially lower level, and boosts subsidies for those at the lower end of the income scale.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that expanded ACA subsidies in the ARP will result in 2.5M more Americans gaining coverage in the next two years. Fully subsidized COBRA coverage for workers who lost their jobs due to COVID is also extended through the end of September, which the CBO estimates will benefit an additional 2M unemployed Americans.
The ARP also puts in place new support for Medicaid, enhancing coverage for home-based care, maternity services, and COVID testing and vaccination, and providing new incentives for the 12 states which haven’t yet expanded Medicaid eligibility under the ACA to do so. In addition to the ACA’s 90 percent match for those states’ Medicaid expansion populations, the lucky dozen will also receive a 5 percent bump to federal matching for the rest of their Medicaid populations should they choose to expand.
Three policy changes of keen interest to providers were left out of the final version of the bill. First, while a special relief fund of $8.5B was created for rural providers, there was no additional allocation of relief funds for hospitals and other providers, similar to the $178B allocated by the CARES Act, despite initial proposals of up to $35B in additional funding. (Around $25B of the initial round of provider relief is still unspent.) Second, the ARP did not extend or alter the repayment schedule for advance payments to providers made last year, in spite of industry pressure to implement more favorable repayment conditions. Finally, the new law does not extend last year’s pause on sequester-related cuts to Medicare reimbursement, although the House is expected to consider a separate measure to address that issue next week.
Notably, the coverage-related provisions of the ARP are only temporary, lasting through September of next year. That sets up the 2022 midterm elections as yet another campaign cycle dominated by promises to uphold and protect the Affordable Care Act—by then a 12-year-old law bolstered by this week’s COVID recovery legislation.
HENRY KOTULA 