Blog post
June 5, 2017 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD
“In the past quarter century, the American medical system has stopped focusing on health or even science. Instead it attends more or less single-mindedly to its own profits.” So begins […]
Blog post
April 19, 2017 / By Richard Fuller, MS, Norbert Goldfield, MD
While Congress is finding it difficult to reach consensus on how to improve health care in the United States, the one thing we all can agree on is that ever-rising […]
Blog post
Jan. 23, 2017 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
Everyone, except for the measurement industry, seems to agree that we have too many metrics1 for measuring performance. An increasing number of individuals and organizations are also saying that the […]
Blog post
Dec. 19, 2016 / By Richard Fuller, MS, Norbert Goldfield, MD
In this month’s blog we return to a recurring theme—the issues related to risk adjustment and performance measurement. More specifically, we think it is important to take a closer look […]
Blog post
Nov. 18, 2016 / By Richard Fuller, MS, Norbert Goldfield, MD
In a recent perspective piece in JAMA Forum, Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health argues that increased provider consolidation is threatening the financial viability of the […]
Blog post
Oct. 21, 2016 / By Richard Fuller, MS, Norbert Goldfield, MD
The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer opined in a recent Washington Post editorial: “The Democrats will eventually push to junk Obamacare for a full-fledged, government-run, single-payer system. Republicans will seek to […]
Blog post
Sept. 21, 2016 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
Last month, an article appeared in Modern Healthcare lauding the achievement of New York’s Bellevue Hospital in reducing readmissions to their facility. The article raised a number of issues relating […]
Blog post
Aug. 17, 2016 / By Richard Fuller, MS, Norbert Goldfield, MD
In the past few weeks, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an article and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (the Academies) released a report […]
Blog post
July 20, 2016 / By Richard Fuller, MS, Norbert Goldfield, MD
In developing our classification tools we are continually called upon to make judgement calls on the relative clinical complexity of individuals and the interaction between comorbid chronic conditions on quality […]
Blog post
June 20, 2016 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
A recent article in the journal Medical Care examines the validity of AHRQ Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) and CMS Hospital-acquired Conditions (HACs) given the growing reliance of these measures for […]
Blog post
May 18, 2016 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
In our March blog, we highlighted some of the challenges with the CMS Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP). In that blog, we alluded to similar design flaws that are present […]
Blog post
March 18, 2016 / By Richard Fuller, MS, Norbert Goldfield, MD
We have discussed payment adjustment for readmission measures in previous blogs. In those blogs, we focused upon risk-adjustment, preventability and the need to account for socioeconomic status (SES) when necessary […]
Blog post
Feb. 19, 2016 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD
Predicting the behavior of human beings is hard – it is hard enough to figure out how to predict the behavior of our loved ones, let alone patients with whom […]
Blog post
Jan. 25, 2016 / By Richard Fuller, MS, Norbert Goldfield, MD
In this blog we take a look at risk-adjustment models used in population health. There are two related but distinct uses for population risk models – payment and population health […]
Blog post
Dec. 21, 2015 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
Health status can be defined succinctly as, “the range of manifestation of disease in a given patient including symptoms, functional limitation, and quality of life, in which quality of life […]
Blog post
Nov. 16, 2015 / By Richard Fuller, MS, Norbert Goldfield, MD
In the MedPAC October meeting, the commission returned to the seemingly intractable problem of equalizing access to health care for rural communities. Medicare payment offers three sources of support within […]
Blog post
Oct. 16, 2015 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
In a recent blog we made the case for quantifying the net effect of drugs upon health expenditures so as to make more rational decisions. Providing information about costs and […]
Blog post
Aug. 21, 2015 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
…for the engine to pick up steam. In the past ten years, the train carrying healthcare pricing and quality information has been rolling but the caboose is still waiting at […]
Blog post
July 22, 2015 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
This blog offers further commentary on the excellent conversation that Paul Levy began in his column, “The Triple Aimers have Missed the Mark.” In his blog, he provides a succinct […]
Blog post
June 26, 2015 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
For the last decade, we have been fortunate enough to work with many state Medicaid programs and commercial payers on reform efforts incorporating outcomes targets for health care providers. The […]
Blog post
May 18, 2015 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
We believe there are two core principles that should be adhered to when implementing payment reform initiatives. First, that measurement of performance change should be directly quantifiable in dollars where […]
Blog post
Jan. 19, 2015 / By Norbert Goldfield, MD, Richard Fuller, MS
It is well known that a viable source of health dollar savings is the efficient use of post-acute care (PAC) services. MedPAC has identified widespread variation in post-acute care utilization, […]
