ICYMI: Trending Healthcare Topics for May 2016
An overview of the changes, trends, and newsmakers from the past month
May was a good month for reflection and checking progress on key initiatives for the healthcare industry. This month, we take a look at healthcare progress, and where some initiatives are lagging. What was on your mind this month?
The progress of new initiatives
- Powering patient engagement: The rise of alternative payments brings new demands—including finding innovative ways to drive enhanced patient participation in healthcare. The Mayo Clinic offers a few tips to help drive successful patient engagement.
- Retail clinics driving utilization: With PCPs feeling the pressure to drive the success of new payment initiatives, retail clinics are emerging as a surprising force for increasing healthcare utilization among patient populations.
- The rise of telemedicine: Telemedicine continues to show positive results, driving progress for patients and providers towards achieving the goals of the triple aim.
Areas for growth
- The continuing saga of meaningful use: Meaningful use was changed and added to MACRA, but some physicians are still wondering if this is for the best, or if it introduces a whole new set of complications.
- Behavioral health reform lagging: When it comes to effective behavioral health care and treatment for adolescents and families facing these issues, the healthcare industry is lagging woefully behind, says the former president and CEO of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation.
- No-risk wrinkles in CPC+: CMS is offering no-risk contracts to try and garner interest for CPC+, yet there is confusion among many potential participants about how best to engage with the program, prompting CMS to release a FAQ about participation.
Driving change
- Moving pop health forward: Population health is showing early signs of effectiveness, but to flourish, the programs will need scaling up through “more sophisticated analytics, patient stratification, community involvement, and care management.“
- The rocky road to value-based care: The evolving nature of the physician-hospital relationship is necessary to implement effective value-based payment practices, yet there’s a few bumps in the road on the way to progress.
- Simplifying priorities: When it comes to successful management and implementation of workflow changes and priorities, one hospital’s chief administrative officer says simplicity is critical to success.