1. 84: Percent of primary care providers in our poll of 406 PCPs, OBGYNs, physician assistants and nurse practitioners under the age of 35 who say the number one condition they see in patients today….stress.
2. Physicians Finishing 2nd: In youth sports, all the kids get trophies and cupcakes, even kids like mine who score for the other team sometimes or little Bobby who spends the entire game offsides yet celebrates as though he’s Pele or Messi after every goal. In healthcare, breaking the rules and then celebrating them is a problem but giving one over to the other team (like discharging a patient early to refer them to the right provider or level of care) is actually encouraged. See highlights from our research study on managed care insurers categorizing physician groups based on their decisions, their quality and cost. Click here
3. Inpatient Psych: Data we analyzed and a poll we did around the new demand for IP psych. Click here
4. Autism’s Cliff: It’s a field in the early innings with new advances in treatment and diagnostics and much of the opportunity in the near term around early intervention and finding ways to align payment with faster, more reliable outcomes. Said Allison Lloyd, a therapist in the school system, ‘I think the big thing is who can get to goal faster – the spending, number of kids diagnosed is only going to go up so you need models that work but don’t take 5 years to take effect. The policymakers, the insurers won’t be that patient’. But there is a looming issue to consider in autism that few are talking about – the kids who will move into teenage years and then young adulthood and leave the security of services and support. Click here for our story.
5. Where Art Thou Behavioral: I was scanning the United Healthcare provider network on my phone the other day. United rents its network to other health insurers, unions and others. On the website you could find pretty much any type of in-network provider, neatly categorized by location, site of care, specialty, zip code – you name it. I was impressed about the ease with which I could find endocrinologists, urgent care, imaging. But there was one condition completely missing, one type of provider nowhere to be found. Behavioral health. There may be a good explanation for this and a spokesperson said they’d look into it. Still, if you’re a provider in this space, and contracted with major health plans like this, you should check these fancy consumer friendly sites – make sure the health plan is doing its part.
6. Extra Point: My wife wants us to get a camera of some kind to monitor our high schoolers while we’re away this weekend. I think this is nonsense – they will either do something dumb or will do what I think they will do which is play video games, eat pizza, play wiffle ball, not clean up. But I’m living in a fog sometimes about what our kids are and are not capable of, and I sometimes forget that snapgram or instachats—or whatever the kids call this now—are a party of 100 waiting to happen. So maybe a camera isn’t such a horrible idea. A group of physicians we polled are having their own debate about remote monitoring, though their wish list seems far more necessary. 71 of the 106 in the poll said there’s a real place for these tools in value-based medicine. Ideas and unmet needs cited as the things they would like to see: a history of all tests and interactions real-time, automated treatment algorithms, graphical display of deviation from target/baseline by monitoring interval (like every day or week) reports on the frequency of interventions or events, and reimbursement for analyzing data as it comes in. Now this last one caught my attention – in terms of your own companies and how you might think about the services around monitoring as both a revenue generator and a tool to provide better care, and in terms of my own family. If I can get paid in peace and quiet for telling my wife that the invasive home monitor is showing there’s a party at my house, I’m in.