Roji Intel Blog

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Episodes of CareFuture of Health CareRiskValue-Based Health Care
July 20, 2020

Episodes Are More Than Payment Models: They’re Key to Improving Care

For many health systems and groups, episodes are esoteric. Providers often think of them only in context of risk-based payment models like bundled payments and capitation. Navigating Value-Based Health Care contracts, providers analyze and model performance under Fee-for-Service and episode-based payments to decide their course of action. Or, if already in Value-Based reimbursement, they use them as targets for costs to pinpoint physicians who exceed the targets. These strategies are shortsighted and limited. Even at best, they do nothing to address what is actually driving cost of care. By using payer-constructed episode specifications, such strategies potentially obscure valuable clinical and…
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Future of Health CarePopulation HealthRacial Inequities in Health CareValue-Based Health Care
July 1, 2020

How to Start Redressing Racial Bias and Reducing Health Care Inequities

In recent weeks there have been many cries for the health care system to finally address racial inequities. Now is the moment to harness that energy toward a process of substantive change. Value-Based Health Care is not achievable without addressing racial inequities that drive costs and poor outcomes: patient disengagement, higher risk factors, greater admissions, and emergency room usage. Fully acknowledging the issues is the first step. Creating better methods to evaluate how race affects decisions and to innovate change is the next. Racial inequities in health care in the U.S. are well documented, including: Higher maternal mortality, with Black…
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Consumers & PatientsCOVID-19Future of Health CarePopulation Health
June 11, 2020

Is Telehealth Bridging or Widening the Health Care Gap? We Need to Find Out.

ROJI Health Intelligence CEO Theresa Hush frames the questions we need to ask about the future of telehealth in this 3:37 minute video. Telehealth has become the go-to solution for health care during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling providers and consumers to remain in contact for routine and non-emergency visits while brick-and-mortar spaces have been closed. Now that health care is reopening, however, telehealth remains a preferred communications medium, and many providers plan to expand it much more going forward. So, it’s time to ask: Are the services we are offering through telehealth really delivering the best health care possible? And,…
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COVID-19Future of Health CareRacial Inequities in Health Care
June 3, 2020

A Pandemic Recovery for Health Care Means Addressing Racial Inequities

Health systems, eager to bring patients back, are using new methods to reach out—mass emails to reassure patients of clean and safe facilities, targeted phone calls to reschedule cancelled appointments and procedures, broadcast television announcements and social media ads that strive to convince patients not to defer care any longer. Providers hope they can recover by encouraging their patients to return. But the pandemic has changed the landscape in health care, in ways that health systems didn't expect. Significantly, it has laid bare the fact that Black Americans are dying in far larger numbers from COVID-19, driven by more severe…
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COVID-19Future of Health CarePopulation HealthSpecialty Services
May 14, 2020

Size is Now a Problem That Large Hospitals and Health Systems Must Solve

For two decades, consolidation in health care has been a strong industry trend. Championed by hospitals and hospital-organized systems, care is now less independent and more centralized, especially in urban settings. Widespread acquisitions of physician practices and towers of specialty services, diagnostics, and treatment seem to have forever changed the health care landscape. But in the era of COVID-19, that configuration of big health care is proving to be a problem. Large systems started turning off the spigot of specialty and non-essential services almost immediately once the community spread of COVID-19 became apparent. As these organizations now try to entice…
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COVID-19Future of Health CarePopulation Health
April 29, 2020

Restarting “Regular” Health Care Will Be Hard: How Providers Can Prepare Now

As states across the country begin to loosen restrictions for the coronavirus pandemic and return to a modified version of normal life, how will our health care system get back to providing regular care? In particular, how can providers pivot from the scale and aftereffects of COVID-19, and bring their patients back? In hot spot areas, that task will also require healing their own organizations. COVID-19 has upended traditional care delivery and revised priorities for patient care. It has changed status of providers and foisted enormous stress on front line staff, to the point of serious trauma and even suicide.…
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ACOsCOVID-19Future of Health CareValue-Based Health Care
April 15, 2020

Stretched to the Limit by COVID-19, Will Providers Get Relief from Medicare Value-Based Programs?

This article originally appeared in the April 2020 edition of Accountable Care News . COVID-19 continues its inexorable, exponential spread here in the U.S. Hospitals in New York City, now accounting for more than 7 percent of confirmed cases worldwide, have less than a quarter of the critical equipment and supplies needed to serve an overwhelming surge of patients. Our health care providers are facing impossible choices, even considering universal Do Not Resuscitate orders for patients with COVID-19. Less than one month ago, CMS was closing applications from providers willing to be part of a major movement to adopt financial…
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Future of Health CareRiskValue-Based Health Care
March 11, 2020

Value-Based Care Defined: Know the Vocabulary of Health Care Reform

Today, as we confront a viral threat that is challenging our health system, its capacity, and how care is financed, it seems appropriate to review some fundamentals. Health care reform has been speeding down a particular track, changing how health care is covered, paid, delivered, and organized. These reforms may seem to be about health care financing, but will make a future difference in health care access and patient outcomes. Medicare is driving the train with its huge budget and rulemaking capabilities. But insurance companies, in lockstep, are rapidly implementing similar changes. Understanding all those changes is no easy task.…
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ACOsDirect ContractingFuture of Health CareValue-Based Health Care
February 27, 2020

ACO Path to Viability: Direct Contracting May Be the Opportunity

What if your best route to viability was the high-risk path you feared the most, because that failure might destroy you? That's the question Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have been asking this week—whether to participate in Medicare's new Direct Contracting (DC) initiative. With a shift in payments from Fee for Service (paid per-provider service), to Global Capitation (paid per-beneficiary), DC completely changes the incentives for the health care system. Whether Direct Contracting is a boon or a bust to ACOs depends on their ability to control the costs of patient care long-term—and whether they have the leverage to do so.…
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Artificial IntelligenceFuture of Health CareResearch
February 12, 2020

Could AI Push Sales of Personal Health Data? How to Protect Consumers While Advancing Science

We are just beginning to see the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine and management of conditions. AI is being used to enhance and speed diagnostic capabilities in conjunction with wearable devices as well as to identify health care cost issues and high risk patients. Companies, health care providers, and researchers hoping to move forward with better medical technology—and tools to make health care more affordable and accessible—are eager to use AI-powered data in applications. They are largely invested in the quest to use AI in health care for the good of consumers and their patients. But data is…
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