Partners in Health

My boss - Dr Anthony Shih - is co-author of the chapter "Achieving the Vision: Payment Reform" in the recently published book "Partners in Health", available in Hardcover and Kindle.

Partners in Health: How Physicians and Hospitals can be Accountable Together (J-B Public Health/Heal

"The combination of visionary leadership, knowledge, and superb timing makes this book a winner. Health care is evolving toward collaboration and integration, and this book is essential reading for anyone wishing to change the relationships between hospitals and physicians."—Donald W. Fisher, PhD, president and CEO, the American Medical Group Association

"This book is a must-read for anyone committed to a high-performance health system. It spells out the practical steps that will move us toward an accessible, coordinated, patient-centered system of care. Its recommendations for payment and regulatory reform underscore the urgency of comprehensive health reform if the current misaligned incentives are to be changed to support those on the frontlines in providing the best care with prudent stewardship of resources."—Karen Davis, PhD, president, The Commonwealth Fund

‎ Full story...

Is it a Bird? A Plane? No, it's Electronic Clinical Data!

Faster than a speeding bullet, the clinical data portal we launched in June has scored it's first physician! It's pretty exciting to have built it, even more so to actually see a physician using it.

The portal allows a physician - or a group of physicians - to upload clinical data relevant to a given condition, in this case Diabetes. We ask for a set of specific, discrete data, not the entire record, such as blood sugar levels, blood pressure, eye exams and the like, and then using the data from the record we score the physician(s) against an evidence-based measure set that scores the doctor on his or her performance for that condition.

So, in this case, the doctor voluntarily submits to being scored for his performance treating and managing his diabetic patients. Any eligible physician who scores well on the measure will start receiving incentive payments from participating payors and purchasers, as well as be recognised in HealthGrades.com

Pretty cool, huh?

In addition, using the same engine we also scored two batches of physicians who are using the NextGen EHR package, thereby scoring their performance directly from the data.

As EHR adoption in the United States grows I anticipate more and more data being available to more and more performance assessors like ourselves, and I look forward to the next five years. Next step? Live report cards that tell you not how a hospital did last year, but how they did YESTERDAY.

Can't wait.‎ Full story...

Physician Performance Assessment

A bit of a departure from my usual transparency efforts, but this week we launched our Clinical Data Portal, a Web-based portal that allows physicians to upload clinical data directly from the chart or from an electronic medical record software and be assessed instantly on their clinical performance. Physicians who score high enough automatically start receiving bonus checks from the Bridges to Excellence program. Pretty neat stuff.

We have started with Diabetes and Cardiac Care, but we'll be rapidly adding more topics for physicians to measure themselves with. Physicians are free to become recognised for any of the topics, but if they fall under a BTE program area, they are eligible for real reward dollars. Next up we'll be processing batch files of data from EMR vendors. Exciting stuff.‎ Full story...