Latest California Healthline Stories
Telehealth May Be Led by Telederm
April Armstrong thinks the medical specialty that’s perfect for California’s nascent telehealth system is dermatology.
“Dermatology is visual,” according to Armstrong, director of the teledermatology program at UC-Davis Medical Center. “That’s the great thing about it, why it’s so suitable for telehealth, is that it’s a visual field. If the image quality is clear, you can tell a lot.”
Today, the Center for Connected Health Policy is scheduled to release an issue brief Armstrong authored on teledermatology. The brief was funded by the California HealthCare Foundation, which publishes California Healthline.
Medicare ACOs a Boon to Senior Care in State?
Don Crane is pretty happy. He’s president and CEO of the California Association of Physician Groups, and he’s been waiting for quite some time for federal officials to finalize the rules governing establishment of Medicare accountable care organizations.
The final regulations announced by CMS could be big news for California, Crane said.
“I think this is going to have a huge impact on the California health care landscape,” Crane said. “What this means is significantly more penetration of ACOs in the senior market.”
778 Assessments a Day To Meet Deadline
The clock is ticking, and it’s a big clock.
When the state eliminated adult day health care as a Medi-Cal benefit, the state Department of Health Care Services announced it would do a complete health risk assessment of all ADHC patients to better determine what their health needs are.
Filling those needs will be a huge chore, but conducting the assessments is big enough all by itself.
Getting Covered Kids To See the Dentist
Dental coverage for children is offered as part of the Healthy Families program, but not all kids who can see the dentist actually go.
Healthy Families, hoping to change that, just received a $100,000 grant to help start a utilization program. The grant was awarded by the DentaQuest Foundation as part of its Oral Health 2014 Initiative, a nationwide effort to reverse oral health disparities in the U.S.
“Our strategy is to create a multi-stakeholder, dental-medical collaboration designed to transform oral health care delivery to more than half a million low-income children in California — with the potential to reach upwards of 900,000 across the state,” according to Ellen Badley, the new deputy director of benefits, quality and monitoring at Healthy Families.
State Laying Foundation for Duals Conversion
The state’s Department of Health Care Services released a series of draft papers this week, outlining some of the concerns and aims of its planned conversion program, which will eventually offer managed care choices to dual eligibles — those Californians who are eligible to receive both Medi-Cal and Medicare benefits.
The latest paper, released yesterday and expected to be posted on the DHCS website today, looks at the possible scope of that transition and finds it could include many more than the 150,000 people originally estimated for the conversion program.
“There are 370,000 duals in Los Angeles County alone,” according to Peter Harbage of Harbage Consulting, who worked on the papers. “There are another 250,000 in the next four largest counties. The paper opens the conversation on that point, as well as on other key issues.”
Extra Year of Operation for PCIP?
A big topic at yesterday’s meeting of the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board (MRMIB) was the agency’s interaction with the state’s Health Benefit Exchange.
Programs MRMIB administers will eventually disappear, absorbed by the introduction of health care reform and the Exchange in 2014. That is fine with the board members at MRMIB, but they gently raised the idea yesterday that programs such as the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan might be continued for a year.
“This population will migrate to the Exchange, and that’s what we want,” board member Richard Figueroa said. “But also, we do have some things to offer, in terms of what we’ve learned about running a transparent process, the single rules engine, and how to get people into these programs and keep them there.”
Getting Business Involved in Health Discussion
Big decisions are being made in health care, many of them affecting California businesses, but the business community won’t have much say in those decisions if leaders don’t step up and participate in defining the future of the health care landscape.
That’s one of the points in a report due out today from the Bay Area Council. The report, “Road Map to a High Value Health System,” analyzes the sources of rising health care costs in California and outlines choices to lower those costs.
“The broader business community and organizations representing the business community have run the gamut from hostile to disengaged,” according to report author Micah Weinberg. “Our message is, if we don’t participate in this process, we’re going to get something we don’t like. So we wanted to make sure businesses get involved.”
Many Opt Out of State’s ADHC Plan
In August, a letter and application packet went out to about 26,000 people in the adult day health care system, a program slated for elimination as a Medi-Cal benefit on Dec. 1.
Beneficiaries were asked to choose between three options: They could sign up for one of the managed care options; they could send in a form to opt out of those plans; or they could do nothing, and would be automatically enrolled.
The results are in: Of those 26,068 patients, 654 chose a managed care plan, and another 10,297 people did nothing and were automatically enrolled in a managed care plan. The majority — 15,117 people — chose to remain in their fee-for-service plans.
Health Care Reform for Small Businesses
The number one key to success for small businesses in the state’s Health Benefit Exchange is choice, according to several presenters at a panel discussion last week in Sacramento.
“You have to have choice, that’s the big thing,” Bill Wehrle of Kaiser Permanente said. “If you don’t have choice, people won’t sign up.”
Wehrle was part of a forum addressing the needs of small businesses in California, and what the state’s exchange needs to do to woo both small-business owners and their employees.
WIC Program May Drop 110,000 in California
The federal government is preparing to cut $1.5 trillion over 10 years from its budget. Under some proposals or in the event automatic reductions are triggered if no compromise solution is reached, cuts could affect health care services for low-income individuals.
Reductions in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Women, Infants and Children program would mean fewer services for California kids, according to Laurie True, executive director of the California WIC Association.
“We would have to take people off the program,” True said. “We haven’t had to take people off this program for many, many years and we think it’s unacceptable.”