In February 2011, I posted on what healthcare delivery reform proposals are getting wrong. Here’s the brief rundown on what I explained:
- Most reform proposals will make care less expensive for patients (due to more integrated care plans, a better focus on preventive care, fewer complications, etc.)
- Providers are the ones charged with making these delivery changes
- Patients saving money = providers getting paid less
- Why would providers make the changes only to lose money? They somehow need to financially benefit from their efforts and improvements
Are there solutions to this? Of course! Here are my favorite two:
First, integrated delivery. If the organization charged with making changes to how care is delivered is the same that will benefit financially, it works. An example might help. I live in Utah, where Intermountain Health Care (IHC) dominates. IHC is really good about doing research and finding ways to improve quality. So let’s pretend they do a lot of heart valve replacements, and that they’re usually paid $20,000. But, if they have a complication, they have to do all sorts of extra work, and they end up getting paid $30,000. (I’m making the numbers up, but I’m not lying about the fact that providers often get paid more for procedures when there were complications.) So, IHC finds that they can tilt the bed at a 20-degree angle and that magically reduces complications by 25%. But that means they’re getting paid $10,000 less every time they avoid that complication! The patient whose complication was averted with the tilting of the bed maybe ends up paying $2,000 less in co-pays than he would have, and the insurance company saves the other $8,000.
Poor IHC, right? They spent thousands of dollars on the research that produced the bed-tilting idea, and now the patients’ and insurance companies’ wallets are benefitting. Except, IHC has a secret. The insurance that patient was on is Select Health, which is IHC-owned! So, really, IHC just saved its patient $2,000 and saved itself $8,000. Not bad! This scenario, when the provider and insurer are the same entity, is called “integrated delivery,” and it creates excellent incentives to improve quality. The only time this breaks down is when IHC averts all sorts of complications for patients on different insurance companies. [Update: There are downsides to integrated delivery organizations, including ACOs, that relate to their limiting of the options available to patients and, thus, interfere with value-sensitive decisions. I won’t explain it here, but I’ve learned more since writing this post.]
This brings me to the second solution, which can sometimes work when it’s not an integrated delivery situation. So when IHC goes to renegotiate their contract with, say, Altius, they will have their reduced-complication-rates data in hand, and they will say, “Hey, we have 25% fewer complications than before, so your average cost will go down from $22,500 to $21,000. But we want some of those savings since you didn’t do anything to warrant saving all that money, so we’ll raise your rates a little bit to make your average cost $22,000, which is still lower than it was before, and we’ll be getting some compensation for all this hard quality-improvement work we’ve been doing.” I guess this solution could be called “splitting the savings.” [Update: Since writing this, an amazing idea called “shared savings” became popular. It’s exactly what I describe above. But it has a pithier name.]
The providers will still be losing some of the savings to the patients and external insurance companies, but at least they’re improving quality and their reputation!
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 