Every year Colorado Business Group on Health releases the ” Health Matters Quality Report” with valuable information you should know. Some of the informative reading includes subjects like: Are We Buying More Health? Plus the Difficult and Changing Role of the Family Physician Bridges to Excellence: A Program to Recognize High Performing Physicians, and much, much […] Read Article
Dr. Alan Bitner with a 5-year-old patient at the allergy and immunology department of the Intermountain clinic in Salt Lake City. Cayce Clifford for The New York Times As employees know all too well, health insurance companies have one surefire way to lower costs: Ask their customers to pay more. Intermountain Healthcare, a nonprofit health […] Read Article
On February 4th, 2016, a group of Executives joined Colorado Business Group on Health in Colorado Springs for a serious discussion on how to control health plan spending from a CEO’s level of engagement. See the story written by Bryan Grossman of the Colorado Business Journal..http://www.csbj.com/2016/02/12/ceos-how-to-control-health-plan-spending/ Read Article
Concerned About Specialty Drugs? In the last two decades, the number of available specialty pharmaceuticals increased from 10 to over 900. While that’s potentially very good news for patients who can benefit from these drugs to manage - or even reverse - their condition, the explosion in the number of specialty drugs has been paralleled […] Read Article
How Medicare and Private Spending Differs - And Why That’s Important to Employers A recent Commonwealth Fund blog - Understanding Differences Between Medicare and Private Insurance Spending -validates what many of us might have guessed all along: Medicare and private insurance spending - while both high - are high for nearly opposite reasons. Specifically… Medicare spending is […] Read Article
A new cost driver analysis based on commercial health payer data in the Colorado All Payer Claims Database (CO APCD) shows that Colorado could save an average of $1,150 per visit and over $800 million annually if patients used a clinic or doctor’s office for non-emergent situations. The report also identifies staggering cost differentials between non-urgent health issues seen […] Read Article
Is Oncology Ground Zero For Reform? By Brian Klepper http://thedoctorweighsin.com/is-cost-of-cancer-care-ground-zero-for-reform/ A few weeks ago, the clinically positive results from the CLEOPATRA oncology trial were released, showing that pertuzumab, when added to docetaxel and trastuzumab as first line chemotherapy, produces an average survival benefit of 15.7 months in HER2 positive breast cancer patients. That good […] Read Article
Don’t believe that over half of the $2.2 trillion we spend on healthcare is due to waste? Check out the recent pwc article, “The Price of Excess: Identifying Waste in Healthcare.” It’s a compelling argument that expands - though only marginally - prior estimates by various researchers (including the Institutes of Medicine in their seminal […] Read Article
On the surface, health insurance exchanges seem like a good idea: an open marketplace where insurers compete with each other to be more efficient and cost-effective in offering standardized products. After all, that’s the essence of a free market. Isn’t that exactly what many of us have argued that health care needs? Well, actually […] Read Article
We shop around when we get a plane ticket or buy a couch. But we spend thousands of dollars on health care without comparing prices. What happens when you pay patients to choose the cheaper option? October’s CBGH meeting with cost commission discusses price transparency: hear the national news story today at http://www.npr.org/2015/10/09/447098694/why-most-people-don-t-shop-around-for-medical-procedures Read Article