Latest California Healthline Stories
Health Care’s ‘Tricky’ Role as Economic Leader in California
A new report showing hospitals’ considerable economic impact in San Francisco reinforces the widely held contention that consistent job growth makes the health care industry a bright spot in an otherwise bleak economic landscape.
Molly Coye of UCLA Discusses Innovative Ways To Improve the Value of Health Care Services
Molly Coye, chief innovation officer of UCLA, spoke with California Healthline about how UCLA and other health care systems are taking steps to increase the value of the health care services they deliver.
FTC Emerges as Another Obstacle to Health Reform Law
The Affordable Care Act pushes new efforts at health care provider integration, like accountable care organizations, that may lead to more market concentration. The Federal Trade Commission is stepping up efforts to stop provider consolidation. Which approach will win out?
Bundled Payments and the Scars of Capitation
Health care organizations are grappling with a new CMS plan to realign payment along episodes of care. California’s experience with capitation and other payment models will give state providers a unique vantage point on the initiative.
Incentives for Public Hospitals a Microcosm of Reform Goals
Want to know how national health care reform might look? Take a look at what California’s public hospitals are doing. They are in the second year of a five-year plan that shares many of the same goals as the Affordable Care Act.
Med Center Lowers Readmission Rates
Karen Rago of UC-San Francisco had an important task: help lower readmission rates of older heart failure patients. It’s one of the targets for health care reform, and the medical center wanted to see how hard it would be to do it.
Pretty hard, Rago said — at least at first.
“We started with a grant, and the aim was to reduce readmission rates at 30 and at 90 days,” Rago said. “That didn’t look like it was going to happen.”
Incentive Plan Working for Public Hospitals
A big component of the federal Medicaid waiver California officials negotiated last year was the provision to set up an incentive program to redesign systems and improve quality in public hospitals.
It’s going well, apparently.
Melissa Stafford Jones of the California Association of Public Hospitals said all the state’s public hospitals “met their milestones.”
Changing the Way Hospitals Do Business
One of the tenets of health care reform is to provide incentives to raise quality, improve outcomes and lower costs.
That idea is what’s behind about $3.3 billion in federal incentives dangled in front of public hospitals in California as part of the Medicaid waiver deal completed late last year. A new policy brief from the California Association of Public Hospitals details some of those changes.
The deal in the waiver agreement — the Delivery System Reform Incentive Program — is a pay-for-performance initiative for 21 public hospitals in California. That change in performance is measured by meeting a myriad of different milestones.
U.S. Facing Dramatic Decline in Number of Emergency Departments, According to Study
Renee Hsia of UC-San Francisco, Sandra Schneider of the American College of Emergency Physicians and Caroline Steinberg of the American Hospital Association spoke with California Healthline about a recent study on emergency department closures.
Health Officials, Public Hospitals at Odds Over Fee
The state says it’s just shifting money around, and that everyone benefits from new federal financing tools known as CPEs — certified public expenditures.
Under the recent federal Medicaid waiver, California can get up to $400 million in federal funds for state-only programs, according to Toby Douglas, director of the California Department of Health Care Services. These are programs licensed or certified by the state providing care and services to a designated population, such as adult day health care or developmental disability care. Public hospitals provide some state-only services, and submit these certified public expenditures, or CPEs, to get federal matching funds.
“But we don’t have enough state-only expenditures, and public hospitals have expenditures beyond what they can get from the waiver,” Douglas said. “We can roll over that money … they get more federal funds, and we get to use their excess certified public expenditures to reach the $400 million mark.