All Articles
CLINICIANS

DMC Bytes - Week of December 7

As Value-Based Care and Telehealth Rise, Patient Experience Measurement Desperately Needs an Update for the Digital Age
Health Affairs Blog (Free)
Sarah Hudson Scholle, Margaret O’Kane, Paul Cotton

Written by NCQA, this Health Affairs Blog points out that as health care moves into the digital age, the way in which we measure patient experiences should follow. CMS has increased the weight of patient experience as part of the Medicare Advantage Star Ratings program based on the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) surveys. However, many believe CAHPS is no longer sufficient to meet the needs of value-based payment models. The authors write:

“Today’s burgeoning VBP landscape makes it more important than ever to put patients first and listen to their voices. The best way to do this is by bringing patient experience measurement into the digital age with tools that are well-known, widely used, and readily adaptable in health care.”

Question: Do you agree that patient experience measures for VBP need to be updated and digital?

What the Pandemic Means for Health Care’s Digital Transformation
Harvard Business Review (subscription required)
John Glaser, J. Marc Overhage, Janet Guptill, Chuck Appleby, Donald Trigg

In this HBR article, the authors consider how health care organizations need to adjust to the “new normal” based on input from a virtual roundtable earlier this year. Three overarching areas surfaced and are addressed in the article:

  • Developing virtual care including delivering care in the right setting and creating a great patient experience;
  • Coping with the financial impact of the pandemic including acceleration towards value-based payment and capitation; and,
  • Embracing lessons learned from managing the crisis, including use of technologies not previously employed (e.g., chatbots), revising organizational digital strategies, and streamlined decision making.

Question: How has the pandemic affected your organization’s plans digital transformation?

Worth a Byte…

Desktop Medicine and the Practice of Wealth Care
JAMA Commentary (Subscription required)
Jason Karlawish

This is a very interesting commentary not clearly introduced by the title. The author comments on another article in this issue of JAMA, “Financial Presentation of Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias” by Nicholas, Langa, Bynum and Hsu. That article concluded:

“Alzheimer disease and related dementias were associated with adverse financial events years prior to clinical diagnosis that become more prevalent after diagnosis and were most common in lower-education census tracts.”

The commentary, however, suggests that artificial intelligence could be used to identify financial behaviors that indicate possible cognitive decline and risk of dementia.

“There is no reason why artificial intelligence cannot learn from financial transactions and smart devices that their natural user, a human like you and I, is not as smart as we used to be in managing our money, and also how we are doing on other cognitively demanding real-life behaviors like using transportation, and technologies like the stove, smartphone, remote control, and computer.”

Question: Would you feel comfortable if financial data were used to generate your credit score and a dementia risk score?

 See what is trending in conversations with your peers across the digital measurement space: