- Health Quality Partners is all about going there. The program enrolls Medicare patients with at least one chronic illness and one hospitalization in the past year. It then sends a trained nurse to see them every week, or every month, whether they’re healthy or sick. It sounds simple and, in a way, it is. But simple things can be revolutionary.
Most care-management systems rely on nurses sitting in call centers, checking up on patients over the phone. That model has mostly been a failure. And while many health systems send a nurse regularly in the weeks or months after a serious hospitalization, few send one regularly to even seemingly healthy patients. This a radical redefinition of the health-care system’s role in the lives of the elderly. It redefines being old and chronically ill as a condition requiring professional medical management.
Health Quality Partners’ results have been extraordinary. According to an independent analysis by the consulting firm Mathematica, HQP has reduced hospitalizations by 33 percent and cut Medicare costs by 22 percent.
Others in the profession have taken notice. “It’s like they’ve discovered the fountain of youth in Doylestown, Pa.,” marvels Jeffrey Brenner, founder of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers.
Now Medicare is thinking of shutting it off.
I highly doubt that physicians are behind this. I know a lot of doctors, a few of whom are close friends of mine, and I've never met one who does shit because it costs more. They do things they think, in their best judgement at the time, will help patients the most. If there is a lobbying effort to kill this program it is most certainly by the hospitals and insurance providers, those who are the big money players. A doctor who makes $500,000 is rich by most people's definition, but (s)he isn't a mover in the Capitol. That is reserved for industrial type money. Hospitals are overrun by MBAs these days. Don't blame the doctors who mostly just want to help people.“This is about power and money,” Brenner says. “The largest group in the top one percent of income in America are physicians.”
I agree with you complete, one of the few bits of the article that bugged me. And it's not just the salary for hospital officials making up the price of health care. It's the equipment supplies. It's the complete lack of transparency in pricing. It's incredible legal costs associated with malpractice. It's an aging system completed resistant to change in technologies and new players.