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While looking at some information on the way that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will be paying doctors, hospitals, and insurers, I have learned that the patient and caregiver survey will play a big part in determining the rate of reimbursement. There are 33 quality measures and 8 of those or about one quarter are related to patient and caregiver experience.
Many providers are worried that these surveys may not accurately reflect the level of care given and will cause low ratings. However, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine argues that appropriately designed and timely administered surveys can provide accurate measures of quality and that efforts to accurately measure patient experiences is possible when done right.
Work done at both the University of North Carolina and Duke show that patient-reported measures are strongly correlated with better outcomes and also capture patient evaluation of care-focused communication with nurses and physicians, rather than noncore aspects of patient experience, such as room features and meals. They did mention on the downside that a patient’s response might be tainted if they are seeking a particular drug that the prescriber was unwilling to use. These individual incidents would probably be of little significance in the overall rating due to the number of surveys used.
If you are interested in learning more about these measures be sure to check our primer on Accountable Care Organizations in our Homerun Slides.
If you are one of those practitioners who is constantly battling the insurance companies to get your patients enough strips then you may want to take a look at the new ADA 2013 guidelines outlined in Item #2. In this article you will read of a small change that the ADA made that should make it easier for your patients to get the number of strips you want them to have each month.
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Dave Joffe, Editor-in-chief