Disease Management Flashcards
Reasons why plausibility factors may be a poor validator of care management savings calculations
Plausibility factors = disease-specific admissions per 1000 in the program year / disease-specific admissions per 1000 in the baseline year
Intent is to validate savings calc by demonstrating that actual utilization is reduced by the intervention.
- Calculated based on entire condition-specific population so they don’t exclude members who are not eligible for or managed by the program
- Calculated based only on admissions and ER visits for primary diagnoses, which represents a very small % of all admissions/costs)
- Don’t account for changes in population
- Don’t account for risk profile of a population
- Don’t account for volatility in admission rates
- Don’t account for existing trends in population
Types of care management methods
- Pre-authorization
- Concurrent review - monitoring care while member is still receiving care in hospital/nursing home
- Case management - health care professional coordinates care of patient w/ serious illness
- Demand management - passive form of informational intervention, often over phone
- Disease management - focus on chronic conditions
- Specialty case management - care manager w/ expertise in particular area
- Population health management - statistical tools used to ID potential high-cost patients who could benefit from voluntary intervention program
- Patient-centered medical home - physical responsible for coordinating all patient care
- ACO - network of doctors and hospitals share responsibility for providing patient care
- Non-traditional provider interventions and care settings - e.g., pharmacists
- Gaps in care and quality improvement programs
- Telehealth, telemedicine
- Bundled payment initiatives
Characteristics of chronic conditions that make them suitable for DM programs
- Once contracted the disease remains with patient for rest of life
- Disease is often manageable w/ combo of drug therapy and lifestyle changes
- Patients can take responsibility for their own conditions
- Average annual cost is high enough to warrant spending resources to manage condition
- Expected cost of non-adherence is high
Principles for establishing a PCMH
- Personal physician
- Physician-directed medical practice - team of individuals taking responsibility for patient’s ongoing care
- Whole person orientation - arranging care w/ other qualified professionals
- Care coordinated and integrated across all elements of health care system and community
- Quality and safety - includes patient-centered outcomes, evidence-based medicine, and continuous quality improvement
- Enhanced access through open scheduling, expanded hours, and E-visits
- Reimbursement structure to support and encourage this model of care
Ways in which ACOs are expected to generate savings
- Implementing care coordination to manage the care of patients who need additional services
- Reducing the need for tests via access to integrated medical records and consistent management by physician
- Developing a network of efficient providers for referrals and limiting use of less efficient/more $$ providers
- Focusing on quality –> fewer unnecessary nervices
- Emphasizing preventive services
Types of interventions conducted by pharmacists
- Drug utilization review - substitute lower cost alternatives, require prior auth
- Medication Therapy Management (MTM) - required by Part D plans; good for those with multiple chronic conditions, taking multiple Part D drugs, annual costs > $4k for covered drugs
- Pharmacist-delivered care management programs - often focus on drug adherence, measured in two ways:
a) Medication possession ratio = # of days supply in patient’s possession / # of days during measurement period during which patient could have had drug
b) Proportion of days covered = # of days of coverage / total # of days in measurement period
Types of clinics that can be used to provide basic health care
- Retail convenient care clinics - staffed by NPs
- Employer worksite clinics
- Urgent care clinics - freestanding centers offering full range of ambulatory services
- Federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) - designated by gov’t to provide health care to underserved and uninsured
Benefits of being designated an FQHC
- Reimbursement for services provided under Medicare and Medicaid
- Medical malpractice coverage
- Eligibility to purchase meds for outpatients at reduced cost
- Access to Nat’l Health Service Corps
- Access to Vaccine for Children Program
- Eligibility for various other federal grants
Areas where actuaries can be involved with care management programs
- Economics of care management programs - help w/ understanding relationship between program inputs and outputs
- Risk adjustment and predictive modeling
a) Predictive modeling - used to ID candidates for intervention programs
b) Risk adjustment used to assess outcomes - Financial outcomes evaluation - help in achieving comparability between reference and intervention population
Principles for measuring results of care management programs
- Reference pop
- Equivalence - reference pop should be equivalent to intervention pop
- Consistent statistics - same stat should be measured in same way in reference and intervention populations
- Appropriate measurement - avoid extraneous/irrelevant variables
- Exposure - exposure group must be clearly defined and all members who meet definition should be included in appropriate group
- Reconcile results - reconcile outcomes of small pop with those of entire health plan (“plausibility analysis”)
Issues that affect DM evaluations for chronic populations
- Regression to the mean - high % of high cost patients in one period will not be high cost in next period b/c of one-time events
- Identifying patients - due to regression to mean, may not be appropriate to use patients’ past data as comparison group. Common alternative is to use population approach (entire pop)
- Establishing uniform risk measure for comparability - objective, consistent definitions should be used to identify candidates for care management program (ensures equivalence)
- Patient selection bias - results with volunteers
- Patient drop outs - may also create bias
- General vs specific population - some interventions are performed on extremely small pop, so some methodologies are inappropriate for measuring results
Considerations when using claims data for evaluating DM programs
- Fixed time periods - 1 year may be too short for outcomes evaluation
- Enrollment issues/eligibility - timeliness of enrollment and disenrollment should be factored into study
- Claims run-out - due to claims lag, results may not be known for up to 2 years after program begins
- Outlier claims - may distort results
- Special problems with claims data - some members are miscategorized
Risk factors for care management studies
- Demo variables
- Exclusionary conditions that exclude certain members (members might not be good candidate for care management)
- Exclusionary conditions that exclude certain claims - exclude claims for conditions that DM does not try to affect (e.g., maternity)
- Persistency - understand terms under which member may enter or leave group
- Chronic prevalence and risk classification - % of individuals in a pop with the condition
- Severity of illness
- Contactability
- Operational issues - # of eligible members, # of chronics identified/enrolled, grad rates, meths used
Components of care management value chain process
- Data warehousing - integrate mbr/claims data, ID conditions
- Predictive modeling - apply models to determine members to target for interventions
- Intervention development - develop campaigns to deliver interventions to target pops
- Outreach and enrollment
- Member coaching and assessment
- Outcomes assessment - clinical/financial/operational
Reasons for measuring health care quality
- Improving health of population
- Monitoring services rendered
- Evaluating outcomes
- Shaping provider behavior
- Meeting reqs of gov’t regs, biz partners, accreditation agencies
Challenges when using codes to measure quality
- Codes don’t give complete picture of care provided (no quality info)
- Coding errors and fraud are prevalent
- Electronic medical records may contain wrong or missing diagnoses
- Source of coded data affects interpretation
- Codes can only indicate if care was provided, not if patient complied with doctor’s orders
Organizations that measure health care quality in US
- Nat’l Quality Forum (NQF) - lead responsibility for determining which measures should be recognized as nat’l standards
- Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality - developed quality indicators which use hospital data to highlight concerns and ID areas for investigation
- Joint Commission - primary accrediting body for hospitals, nursing homes, etc
- CMS - develops measures of quality
- Nat’l Committee for Quality Assurance - develops quality standards for various health care orgs; develops HEDIS measures
- Hospital Quality Alliance - develops performance measures of hospital care
- Measures Applications Partnership - ID best performance measures for specific applications
- American Medical Association Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement - developed evidence-based performance measurement sets
Categories for measuring health care quality
- Structure - resources and org arrangements are in place to deliver care
- Process - appropriate physician and other provider activities are carried out
- Outcomes - results
Methodologies for assessing progress of clinical quality initiatives
- Percentage compliance = # of times service was provided / # of times provider could have performed service (not counting patients whose conditions preclude them from treatment)
- A vs E performance - consider comparability between intervention and comparison populations (risk and case mix)
- Performance against benchmark - provider’s performance is compared to benchmark to determine efficiency
Possible reasons why DM studies show improved clinical outcomes but not cost savings
- Measurement of financial outcomes is not stable enough to detect positive outcomes
- Programs are either not focused on financial outcomes or not structured to optimize financial outcomes
- Program sponsors do not understand economics of DM programs and therefore do not optimize programs for financial return
- Improvements in quality of care do not always lead to lower costs
(Factors to help resolve contradiction include better understanding of economics of DM programs, more rigorous measurement of financial outcomes, and reconciliation between program savings/overall claim costs/cost increase trends)