By Dr. John Toussaint | May 2, 2015 With President Barack Obama’s recent signing of legislation repealing the sustainable growth-rate formula for physician compensation and revising the Medicare qualified entity program, doctors will be paying more attention than ever to value. The impact will be profound. Here in Wisconsin, we’ve been privileged to watch it develop from the ground up. […]
ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value CEO: “The significance of this provision is dramatic.” Wednesday, April 15, 2015 WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin applauded the Senate’s bipartisan passage of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (H.R. 2) by a vote of 92-8, which repeals Medicare’s Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula and […]
On a vote of 92-8, the Senate passed the SGR repeal and replacement bill without amendment. The bill now goes to the President, who is expected to quickly sign the bill. Read about this historic legislation and what it means for healthcare: http://www.medpagetoday.com/Washington-Watch/Washington-Watch/50991
Today the House passed a permanent fix to the SGR Bill. It is believed by most that the Senate will follow suit in a few days. The significance of this act is dramatic. The SGR problem has been going on since the 1990s, when the bill was first passed. If it were going to go […]
Quality Data, Quality Healthcare Act Improves Transparency for Better Healthcare Decisions and Patient Outcomes Monday, March 9, 2015 WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and John Thune (R-SD) today introduced bipartisan legislation that increases the transparency of healthcare costs in Medicare—helping doctors, health systems, private insurers and research institutions provide more efficient, higher […]
Reducing patient suffering — the kind caused not by disease but by medical care itself — has become a medical goal. The effort is driven partly by competition and partly by a realization that suffering, whether from long waits, inadequate explanations or feeling lost in the shuffle, is a real and pressing issue. It is […]
GREEN BAY – As a cost-conscious consumer, you wouldn’t pay $3 a gallon for gas if across town you could buy it for $2.50. But whether you realize it or not that’s what you’re doing with health care. FOX11 Investigates found hospitalization cost figures, provided by Green Bay’s four hospitals, show a wide range of […]
Article in Today’s Hospitalist written by David A. Frenz, MD, a hospitalist for HealthEast Care System in St. Paul, Minn., and is board certified in both family and addiction medicine. AMERICANS—both individually and as a nation— spend a boatload on health care. A study in the January 2013 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine pegged annual health […]
In Innovation and Best Practices in Health Care Scheduling, CEOs with experience leading change in five of the nation’s prominent health systems-Denver Health, Geisinger Health System, Kaiser Permanente, ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value, and Seattle Children’s Hospital-describe how they tackled the complex issues surrounding wait times throughout the continuum of care. They review the important forces […]
The Health Care Cost Institute published a new data brief that examines trends in out-of-pocket spending at a national and state level, and looks at average differences in consumer prices for a set of five common medical procedures nationally and in nine states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin. With […]