Recently RAND released the fifth in a series of employer focused reports: “Prices Paid to Hospitals by Private Health Plans”, the fifth in a series of employer-led transparency reports, developed in conjunction with the Employers Forum of Indiana and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In this report, they focus on average prices paid for hospital services. According to CMS, in 2022, hospital

Nearly every healthcare company promotes itself as a game-changer, but of course few are. Over the past decade, I have focused on identifying and vetting “high-performing” healthcare organizations. I mean this term to refer to firms that consistently deliver measurably better health outcomes and/or lower costs than conventional approaches, particularly in high-value niches – e.g., management of chronic disease, musculoskeletal conditions, cancer and other

How health-care opacity neutralizes competition and fuels a corporate race to corner health-care markets to corner health-care markets

It seems inevitable that, in the near future, an innovative health care organization – let’s call it The Platform – is going to seize the market opportunity of broader value. It will cobble together the pieces and demonstrate to organizational purchasers that it consistently delivers better health outcomes at significantly lower cost than previously has been available.

Most of us don’t think twice about getting on a commercial airline. The odds of dying on even the worst 39 airlines is 1 in 1.5 million or a .0000006% chance of death. This is more than five times better than Six Sigma quality (defect levels below 3.4 per million).

The decision to implement a worksite clinic typically reflects an employer’s desire to exert more control over health plan care and cost. Most expect their clinic investment will yield improved health outcomes and a high multiple of health plan savings. In some cases that happens, but more often the savings are elusive.

A telling revelation from a September 2015 Mercer survey of 134 worksite clinic sponsors was that “only 41% were able to provide ROI data.

The recent explosion of interest in onsite clinics – not just by employers, but by health plans, hospital systems, public health programs, and others – is anything but just another healthcare fad. At once, clinics’ growing popularity signals purchasers’ weariness with an intransigent, self-interested health system, as well as their guarded optimism about a better way.