AJMC® in the Press, September 29, 2017

ChenMed, an organization focused on improving the quality of care for seniors, published a report on the benefits of a concierge care model for low-income seniors, which was also featured in a contributor post on the website of The American Journal of Managed Care^® (AJMC^®). According to a press release from ChenMed, the report explained how the value-based care model is tailored to the needs of the seniors it serves. “We have found that by providing intensive, ‘concierge-style’ care to this population, we can have meaningful impact on their health outcomes and costs,” wrote Christopher Chen, MD, in the contributor post.

On Thursday, the National Pharmaceutical Council daily e-newsletter featured an article from the AJMC^® newsroom covering the release of a new report on eliminating health equities. The article, “National Quality Forum Presents ‘Roadmap’ for Reducing Disparities,” explained that the report contained 4 specific actions that health systems should take, such as incentivizing health equity efforts through new payment models. The National Quality Forum’s president and CEO, Shantanu Agrawal, MD, MPhil, will be a plenary speaker at the fall meeting of the ACO and Emerging Healthcare Delivery Coalition, an initiative of AJMC^®. To see the full agenda and to register, click here.

AJMC^® coverage of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s Oncology Policy Summit was highlighted in the OBR Daily e-newsletter on Wednesday. The article, “Lending the Patient Voice to Oncology Quality Measurement,” summarized a presentation by Ronald Walters, MD, MBA, MHA, MS, about patient-centric quality measures. Provider-centric measures like cost, resource utilization, and care coordination are still important, Walters said, but more systems are beginning to gather patient-centered metrics like experience, engagement, and outcomes.