Tuesday, June 06, 2017

Tuesday Tidbits

Following up on Sunday's post about high dollar claims, a large health claims stop loss insurer Sun Life Financial reported that multi-million dollar health claims have increase 68% over the past four years. 
 * Cancer dominates the top 10 - Based on dollar amount and percentage of total stop-loss claims, malignant neoplasms and leukemia/lymphoma/multiple myeloma (cancers) took spots 1 and 2 on the top-ten catastrophic claims list, representing more than a quarter (26.7%) of total stop-loss reimbursements from 2013-2016;
* Breast cancer prevalence - Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in the U.S., with an estimated 247,000 new cases reported in 2016, and an average paid claim amount of $147,100;
* Transplants costs are high - Bone marrow/stem cell transplants are the costliest transplant procedures, with an average paid claim cost of about $400,000. Transplants were the most common high-dollar claim condition among 20 to 39 year-olds;
* Highest individual claim - Of the top-10 conditions, the highest claim was $3.2 million, for malignant neoplasm (cancer). The attached chart details the highest claims in each top-10 condition;
* The top three highest-cost conditions - Leukemia, lymphoma and/or multiple myeloma (cancers); congenital anomalies (conditions present at birth); and malignant neoplasm (cancers) are more likely to result in million-dollar claimants due to their frequency; and
* IV medications tracked in the study pushed up costs - When looking at data on intravenous drugs, the report showed they accounted for 48% of total paid charges on the top five highest-dollar claimants. Of the 562 claimants exceeding $1 million between 2013 and 2016, 45 generated more than $1 million in high-cost intravenous medications.
The American Medical Association issued its annual physician practice benchmark survey.
Previous research has documented the long term trend away from physicians being practice owners and toward being employees as well as toward larger practice sizes (Kane, 2015). The new Benchmark data show that this trend continued through 2016. In fact, 2016 marked the first year in which less than half of practicing physicians owned their own practice—47.1 percent. This was about 6 percentage points lower than in 2012.
This is a clear consequence of the ACA.

The Wall Street Journal today reported on another interesting physician practice survey.
It is something nine out of 10 primary-care practices have said to at least one patient in the past two years, albeit more politely. According to research published last month in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, 67% of nearly 800 practices reported dismissing one to 20 patients over two years while 15% reported dismissing 21 to 50 patients. About 10% reported dismissing no patients over the course of two years and 8% said they dismissed 51 or more patients.
The study was inspired by worries that patient dismissals may rise because some insurers are starting to reimburse doctors for health outcomes rather than services provided. That shift has been in the works, before the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010.
“The good news is in our study we found that no, it did not have an impact,” said Ann O’Malley, the first author on the study and a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, a Princeton, N.J., policy-research organization. “The providers stuck with their patients. They did not seem to be worried that just because they were in this initiative and being measured on some sort of quality metric that they needed to cherry-pick their patients.”
Finally, the FEHBlog ran across this Health Data Management article about a successful initiative to increase the number of skilled practitioners to treat autism.   Here's a Science Daily article about the Project ECHO autism program which is based at the University of Missouri.
Launched in March 2015, ECHO Autism is a partnership between the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, MU Health, and the Missouri Telehealth Network Show-Me ECHO program. ECHO Autism clinics are conducted using high-quality, secure video conferencing technology to connect participating primary care clinics to a panel of experts.
Initial studies of the program have found that participating primary care providers demonstrated significant improvements in confidence across all sectors of health care for children with autism, including screening and identification, assessment and treatment of medical and psychiatric conditions, and knowledge of and referral to available resources.
The project is being expanded to Alabama and Alaska among other geographic areas.

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