PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Internists express support for new payment and delivery models as basis for replacing SGR

ACP testimony focuses on innovative solutions to align value with care

2012-07-19
(Press-News.org) (Washington) – "We know that the current Medicare payment system is not serving the needs of patients, physicians or taxpayers," David L. Bronson, MD, FACP, president of the American College of Physicians (ACP), today told the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Health. "Congress needs to do its part by repealing the SGR, once and for all. But the medical profession needs to do its part by leading the adoption of innovative models to align payment policies with the value of care provided to patients."

Dr. Bronson pointed to several promising payment and delivery system reforms that are being extensively implemented in the public and privates sectors, and could soon be broadly adopted by Medicare.

Specifically, ACP recommended that the Patient-Centered Medical Home model be scaled up for broad Medicare adoption. Features of the medical home contribute to increasing the quality of care and reducing unnecessary costs to patients and the health care system in general. There is an extensive and growing body of evidence on the medical home's effectiveness in improving outcomes and lowering costs.

"This model, which is built on a strong, redesigned primary care infrastructure, has demonstrated significant cost savings," Dr. Bronson said. "Congress should accelerate Medicare adoption of the medical home model by providing higher payments to physician practices that have achieved recognition. At a subsequent stage, medical home performance metrics could be added and incorporated into Medicare payment policies."

Both as part of his comments and in submitting ACP's statement for the record, Dr. Bronson also recommended that Congress should enact payment policies to accelerate adoption of the related Medical Home Neighborhood model.

"The concept of a 'medical neighborhood' is essential to the ultimate success of the medical home," he said. "It recognizes that specialty and subspecialty practices, hospitals, and other healthcare professionals and entities that provide treatment to the patient need to be recognized and provided with incentives—both non-financial and financial—for engaging in patient-centered practices that complement and support the efforts of the PCMH to provide high quality, efficient, coordinated care."

ACP proposes that Congress help increase non-primary care specialists' participation in the medical home neighborhood model by offering higher Medicare payments to practices that have achieved neighborhood recognition with standards to be developed by the Secretary of HHS.

"Congress should establish Medicare incentives for physicians to incorporate evidence-based guidelines from national medical specialty societies into shared decision-making with their patients," Dr. Bronson implored.

ACP's "High Value, Cost-Conscious Care Initiative," which includes clinical, public policy, and educational components, was designed to help physicians and patients understand the benefits, harms, and costs of an intervention and whether it provides good value, as well as to slow the unsustainable rate of health care cost increases while preserving high-value, high-quality care.

Programs like this initiative could be incorporated into Medicare payment policies by: reimbursing physicians appropriately for spending time with patients to engage them in shared decision-making based on the recommendations from this initiative and similar efforts by other specialty societies, and developing a way to recognize, with higher payments, physicians who can demonstrate that they are incorporating such programs into their practices and engagement with their patients.

ACP also believes that additional steps could be taken now to help physicians move toward models aligned with value to patients, as well as rewarding those who have taken the leadership and risk of participating in new models like medical homes and ACOs.

Even as new models are being more thoroughly developed and pilot-tested, physicians in the meantime could get higher updates for demonstrating that they have successfully participated in an approved transitional value-based payment program.

"ACP believes that for the first time in many years," Dr. Bronson concluded, "we can begin to see a vision of a better future where the SGR no longer endangers access to care, Medicare recognizes and supports the value of primary and coordinated care, and where every person enrolled in Medicare has access to high-functioning primary care through certified medical homes, and other promising care coordination models, including value-based payment models.

"I hope that my testimony today demonstrates that enough progress is being made to move forward on new payment and delivery models as the basis for replacing the SGR," Dr. Bronson concluded. "Getting from here to there, though, will require that Congress enact a legislative framework to eliminate the SGR, stabilize payments during a transition phase, evaluate and implement new models, and specify a pathway and timetable to such models. ACP specifically calls on Congress to work from the Medicare Physician Payment Innovation Act of 2012, H.R. 5707, introduced by Reps. Allyson Schwartz (D-Penn.) and Joe Heck (R-Nev.), the only bipartisan bill that we are aware of that would facilitate such a transition to a better payment system for patients and doctors alike."

INFORMATION:

The American College of Physicians is the largest medical specialty organization and the second-largest physician group in the United States. ACP members include 133,000 internal medicine physicians (internists), related subspecialists, and medical students. Internists specialize in the prevention, detection, and treatment of illness in adults. Follow ACP on Twitter and Facebook.

END



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Efficacy of herbal remedies for managing insomnia

2012-07-19
New Rochelle, NY, July 18, 2012— Approximately 1 in 3 Americans suffers from chronic sleep deprivation and another 10-15% of the population has chronic insomnia. Sleep disorders can profoundly affect a person's whole life and have been linked to a range of diseases, including obesity, depression, anxiety, and inflammatory disorders. Over-the-counter herbal remedies are often used to treat insomnia, but surprisingly, very little research has been done to study their efficacy, according to an article in Alternative and Complementary Therapies, published by Mary Ann Liebert, ...

Hookah smoking increasingly common among first-year college women

2012-07-19
PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Nearly a quarter of college women try smoking tobacco with a hookah, or water pipe, for the first time during their freshman year, according to new research from The Miriam Hospital's Center for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine. The study, published online by Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, suggests a possible link to alcohol and marijuana use. Researchers found the more alcohol women consumed, the more likely they were to experiment with hookah smoking, while women who used marijuana engaged in hookah smoking more frequently than their peers. They ...

Moffitt Cancer Center researchers find potential key to new treatment for mantle cell lymphoma

2012-07-19
Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues have demonstrated that the inhibition of signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) in mouse models of mantle cell lymphoma (MCL), an aggressive and incurable subtype of B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma that becomes resistant to treatment, can harness the immune system to eradicate residual malignant cells responsible for disease relapse. Their study appears in a recent issue of Cancer Research, published by the American Association for Cancer Research. "Despite good initial response to first-line treatment ...

Fighting obesity with thermal imaging

2012-07-19
Scientists at The University of Nottingham believe they've found a way of fighting obesity — with a pioneering technique which uses thermal imaging. This heat-seeking technology is being used to trace our reserves of brown fat — the body's 'good fat' — which plays a key role in how quickly our body can burn calories as energy. This special tissue known as Brown Adipose Tissue, or brown fat, produces 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body. Potentially the more brown fat we have the less likely we are to lay down excess energy or food as white fat. Michael ...

UCF discovers exoplanet neighbor smaller than Earth

2012-07-19
The University of Central Florida has detected what could be its first planet, only two-thirds the size of Earth and located right around the corner, cosmically speaking, at a mere 33light- years away. The exoplanet candidate called UCF 1.01, is close to its star, so close it goes around the star in 1.4 days. The planet's surface likely reaches temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The discoverers believe that it has no atmosphere, is only two-thirds the gravity of Earth and that its surface may be volcanic or molten. "We have found strong evidence for ...

El Zotz masks yield insights into Maya beliefs

2012-07-19
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A team of archaeologists led by Brown University's Stephen Houston has uncovered a pyramid, part of the Maya archaeological site at El Zotz, Guatemala. The ornately decorated structure is topped by a temple covered in a series of masks depicting different phases of the sun, as well as deeply modeled and vibrantly painted stucco throughout. The team began uncovering the temple, called the Temple of the Night Sun, in 2009. Dating to about 350 to 400 A.D., the temple sits just behind the previously discovered royal tomb, atop the Diablo ...

Parental consent for HPV vaccine should not be waived, poll says

2012-07-19
ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Most U.S. adults support laws that allow teens to get medical care for sexually transmitted infections without parental consent. But when asked about the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), most adults want parents to have the final say on whether their teen or pre-teen gets the shots. The University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health recently asked a national sample of adults about allowing adolescents age 12 to 17 years old to receive the HPV vaccinations without parental consent. Only 45 percent ...

Scientists develop new carbon accounting method to reduce farmers' use of nitrogen fertilizer

2012-07-19
It's summer. For many of us, summer is a time synonymous with fresh corn, one of the major field crops produced in the United States. In 2011, corn was planted on more than 92 million acres in the U.S., helping the nation continue its trend as the world's largest exporter of the crop. Corn is a nitrogen-loving plant. To achieve desired production levels, most U.S. farmers apply synthetic nitrogen fertilizer to their fields every year. Once nitrogen fertilizer hits the ground, however, it's hard to contain and is easily lost to groundwater, rivers, oceans and the atmosphere. "That's ...

Sleep deprivation may reduce risk of PTSD according to Ben-Gurion U. researchers

2012-07-19
BEER-SHEVA, Israel, July 17, 2012 –Sleep deprivation in the first few hours after exposure to a significantly stressful threat actually reduces the risk of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to a study by researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and Tel Aviv University. The new study was published in the international scientific journal, Neuropsychopharmacology. It revealed in a series of experiments that sleep deprivation of approximately six hours immediately after exposure to a traumatic event reduces the development of post trauma-like ...

Protein build-up leads to neurons misfiring

2012-07-19
Using a two-photon microscope capable of peering deep within living tissue, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found new evidence that alpha-synuclein protein build-up inside neurons causes them to not only become "leaky," but also to misfire due to calcium fluxes. The findings – the first recorded in vivo using a transgenic mouse model of Parkinson's disease – are published in the July 18 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience and provide new insights into how Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders known as ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Pink skies

Monkeys are world’s best yodellers - new research

Key differences between visual- and memory-led Alzheimer’s discovered

% weight loss targets in obesity management – is this the wrong objective?

An app can change how you see yourself at work

NYC speed cameras take six months to change driver behavior, effects vary by neighborhood, new study reveals

New research shows that propaganda is on the rise in China

Even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts, study finds

Novel genes linked to rare childhood diarrhea

New computer model reveals how Bronze Age Scandinavians could have crossed the sea

Novel point-of-care technology delivers accurate HIV results in minutes

Researchers reveal key brain differences to explain why Ritalin helps improve focus in some more than others

Study finds nearly five-fold increase in hospitalizations for common cause of stroke

Study reveals how alcohol abuse damages cognition

Medicinal cannabis is linked to long-term benefits in health-related quality of life

Microplastics detected in cat placentas and fetuses during early pregnancy

Ancient amphibians as big as alligators died in mass mortality event in Triassic Wyoming

Scientists uncover the first clear evidence of air sacs in the fossilized bones of alvarezsaurian dinosaurs: the "hollow bones" which help modern day birds to fly

Alcohol makes male flies sexy

TB patients globally often incur "catastrophic costs" of up to $11,329 USD, despite many countries offering free treatment, with predominant drivers of cost being hospitalization and loss of income

Study links teen girls’ screen time to sleep disruptions and depression

Scientists unveil starfish-inspired wearable tech for heart monitoring

Footprints reveal prehistoric Scottish lagoons were stomping grounds for giant Jurassic dinosaurs

AI effectively predicts dementia risk in American Indian/Alaska Native elders

First guideline on newborn screening for cystic fibrosis calls for changes in practice to improve outcomes

Existing international law can help secure peace and security in outer space, study shows

Pinning down the process of West Nile virus transmission

UTA-backed research tackles health challenges across ages

In pancreatic cancer, a race against time

Targeting FGFR2 may prevent or delay some KRAS-mutated pancreatic cancers

[Press-News.org] Internists express support for new payment and delivery models as basis for replacing SGR
ACP testimony focuses on innovative solutions to align value with care