The Commonwealth Fund Connection serves as a roundup of Fund publications, charts, and multimedia added to the Commonwealth Fund Web site in the last two weeks, and also offers links to other timely content.
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What's New
This week, the nation marked a major milestone in the effort to create a high-performing health care system in the United States. On this six-month anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, major changes begin to roll out, such as the requirement that health insurance plans allow young adults to join or stay on their parents' health plan until age 26, and a ban on the insurance company practice of rescinding coverage when enrollees get sick. Additional health care reforms in the coming months and years are designed to improve how care is organized, delivered, and paid for.
The newly updated Commonwealth Fund report, Starting on the Path to a High Performance Health System: Analysis of the Payment and System Reform Provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, analyzes the new law's provisions that will affect health care providers' financial incentives, the organization and delivery of health services, investment in prevention and population health, and the capacity to achieve the best health care and health outcomes for all Americans. Recent analysis shows that these provisions have the potential to reduce administrative expenses and lead to significant modernization of the health care system, lowering the rate of cost growth and returning total national savings of $590 billion or more in the coming decade.
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Recent Releases
Newly released census data show that there were 50.7 million uninsured Americans in 2009—the highest level since data collection began in 1987. According to Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis, this loss of health insurance is having a substantial impact on the middle class. Among the 4.3 million newly uninsured, half have incomes over $50,000. "These numbers illustrate the harsh toll the recession has taken on millions of Americans' access to health care and highlight the urgent need for those provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) designed to provide middle-class families with affordable options if they lose coverage through their jobs," Davis said. Also read Davis' new blog post on how the ACA provisions effective this week will help young adults, those with serious medical conditions, Medicare beneficiaries, and other Americans. Read more »
Much of the information available to patients when they are selecting physicians is not predictive of the quality of care those doctors deliver, a new Commonwealth Fund–supported study finds. Published in the latest Archives of Internal Medicine, the study finds that such physician attributes as medical school attended, years of experience, and malpractice claims—which consumers are often encouraged to use in choosing doctors—do not correlate with good-quality care. Read more »
The latest issue of this bulletin on promoting value in health care features a note from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius; advice on implementing health reform policy; an update on health data sharing; and more. Read more »
Help Me Grow is a unique system for helping families, primary care practices, and other providers identify developmental or behavioral concerns in children from birth through age 8 and connecting families and clinicians with community resources. This online manual, based on Connecticut's experience, offers guidance to other states and regions for exploring, creating, and/or enhancing such a system. Read more »
In this Commonwealth Fund–supported study published in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers compared the effect that having a choice of health plans has on California Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled in managed care. Beneficiaries without a choice of plan enrolled more quickly, while those with a choice were more likely to delay enrollment in a plan. The authors also found that beneficiaries with a plan choice were admitted to the hospital at a higher rate for conditions that could have been treated earlier in an ambulatory care setting. Read more »
Electronic health records present new opportunities to use data for quality measurement and improvement activities. For example, such systems can generate medication lists, provide decision-support functions, and include portals for patients to provide input. This Commonwealth Fund–supported study, published in Medical Care Research and Review, examined the reliability and validity of data gathered through electronic health records and flagged important issues related to quality measurement, such as data granularity, timeliness, and comparability. Read more »
New on the Web
To mark this week's six-month anniversary of the passage of health reform, The Commonwealth Fund launched the Health Reform Resource Center, the most comprehensive tool for exploring and understanding the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Visitors to the Center can view a timeline of the law's major provisions and use the "Find Health Reform Provisions" tool to search for clear, detailed summaries of specific provisions by year, category, and/or stakeholder group. Users can download and print the timeline and search results.
Also see the Kaiser Family Foundation's new Health Reform Source, which explains the basics of the new law and provides a timeline, analysis, data, and other resources. Read more »
In a new blog post, Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis and Executive Vice President for Programs Stephen Schoenbaum discuss the promise and pitfalls of accountable care organizations (ACOs)—a relatively new type of provider organization that is responsible for a population of patients across the continuum of care. Under the Affordable Care Act, ACOs will be given incentives to play a more prominent role in caring for Medicare beneficiaries. Read more »
We invite you to take a short survey to tell us what you think of WhyNotTheBest.org, The Commonwealth Fund's performance benchmarking and quality improvement site. We are working to expand and improve the site; your responses will help us make it as useful as possible.
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Join a webinar exploring the financial implications of reducing hospital readmissions. The session will be led by Amy Boutwell, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's director of health policy strategy, and two financial directors of hospitals that are working to reduce readmissions as part of the Commonwealth Fund–sponsored initiative, State Action on Avoidable Readmissions, or STAAR. The free session will take place October 7 from 2:00–3:00 PM EDT. Click here to register.
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News
Commonwealth Fund Executive Vice President for Programs Steve Schoenbaum, M.D., has decided to leave the foundation at the end of this year. Dr. Schoenbaum is not only an outstanding executive and a national expert on health system improvement, but also a dear friend to his colleagues. Read more. Read more »