Industry Insights

In previous blog postings we’ve commented about the guidelines that CMS recently issued for the bundled payment initiative, noting that they were extremely flexible and gave the providers considerable leeway in proposing approaches to work together with physicians to achieve quality improvements and cost savings.   In a recent interview in

For those of us who are not lawyers but enjoyed watching them in action, the legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act have been more entertaining than the new TV season.  The stakes got kicked up a little higher this week when both the Obama administration and the original plaintiffs requested the Supreme Court to review the decision of the 11^th Circuit court.  A Health Affairs blog has a detailed description of this case at http://healthaffairs

Recently CMS released an announcement of the creation of a database specifically designed to contain ACO-related information.  I had hoped that it would clarify the type of data that would be released to ACOs, and the timing and frequency of the release. But the immortal words of Pete Townsend prevailed, and I was fooled again. It looks like this will primarily be an internal CMS database containing patient, provider and administrative data, which will largely be used by CMS.