To round out the year, I thought I’d choose my favorite blog posts in a “Best of 2022” post. This year brought so many interesting aspects of U.S. healthcare to light, from the unclear future of multiple plans meant to help folks through the pandemic, to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s research highlighting how maternal outcomes worsened during the pandemic. So here, without further ado, and in no particular order, are my picks for top blog posts of the year:
Benchmarking APMs
How do insurance plans structure arrangements that encourage healthcare providers to deliver increasingly better care year after year, while also not sacrificing quality? That’s where benchmarks come in. In this post I get into the nitty-gritty of how benchmarking works, and how healthcare benchmarks work in different payment models.
Maternal Mortality and PHM part 1
The U.S. leads all wealthy nations in terms of maternal mortality rates. This statistic is hard to swallow, especially since two in three such complications are preventable. In part one of a two-part series, I explore why maternal and infant health in the U.S. is substandard when compared to other peer nations.
Maternal Mortality and PHM part 2
In this second installment of a two-part series, I look at how population-level care strategies might optimize maternal and newborn health.
What is a Health Insurance Exchange?
So what is a health insurance exchange anyway? We’ve all heard about them, but admittedly I never looked into them in much depth. In this installment of my “What Is…?” series, I put a magnifying glass up to what these exchanges are, and how to maintain coverage if legislation like ARPA and FFCRA expire.
Mental Health and PHM
Counter to the widely-accepted view that mental and physical wellbeing are inextricably linked, care for mental and physical conditions is often not coordinated between healthcare providers. Indeed, behavioral health services (which include both mental health and substance use treatment services) are often located in geographically separate locations from physicians’ offices. In this post, I look at the challenges of matching people up with appropriate mental healthcare in such a system.
Place-Based Care in the UK
In this deep-dive piece, I delve into an approach to PHM undertaken by National Health Service (NHS) England, namely its so‐called “Place‐Based Systems of Care” program. Somewhat related to the piece linked to above about mental health and PHM, the Brits have decided that co-locating care along geographic lines makes the most sense when rationing limited healthcare resources.
Helping Children with Asthma
Being as I live in the Washington, DC area, this post is particularly close to my heart. In it, I examine an ongoing program called the Healthy Housing Virtual Home Visiting (VHV) Program, which is a collaboration of medical and housing experts. The group works to repair homes in low socioeconomic areas of Washington, DC to cut down on the level of allergens and improve the health of children with asthma.
Involving Specialists in PHM
This post looks at a Harvard Business Review article that makes a compelling argument for health systems to recruit specialists to become entry points into the population health management ecosystem. In some instances, specialists may stand a better chance at enrolling patients into early disease management programs that help address negative social determinants of health.