One of the newer ideas to hit employee benefit health plan design is tiering copayments according to the quality of the provider accessed by the insured. United Healthcare and Medica are two of the health plans that have introduced these plans.
The idea is simple in concept – insureds’ copays are higher for those providers deemed to be less than optimal. The issues lie in the criteria and methodology used to determine the rankings.
A critic, Al Eldendary, president of the St. Louis Metropolitan Medical Society, notes that UHC uses bills and claim data instead of medical records, and therefore the assessment of quality is not based on a complete picture of the patients’ situations.
United’s head of clinical strategy noted that the analytics uses survey as well as patient data, and also acknowledged that the criteria also includes some cost data.
Fof those of us who have been criticizing medical treatment guidelines, provider profiles, and clinical pathways for years, this is another piece of evidence casting doubt on the entire process and the results thereof. Few would dispute that medical bill data is rife with errors of accuracy, that diagnosis and procedure data is not only inconsistently coded but reflects a desire to maximize reimbursement and not to accurately represent the actual care delivered to the patient. Moreover, there is no assessment of the patient’s functionality at the end of treatment.
How can any reimbursement system that supposedly focuses on “quality” fail to consider whether the patient got better, died, returned to full functionality, or was partially disabled? After all, is not the goal of health care to ensure the health and wellbeing of the patient?
What does this mean for you?
Be very wary of medical guidelines, provider reimbursement schemes, and profilign activities that do not take into account the patient’s functionality. Without that end point, you are just looking at the left side of the equation, as the result is unknown.
May
23
