ACCOUNTABLE CARE ORGANIZATION

Integrated health care association (IHA) is a national wide health organization that provides quality, improvement and accountability health care in California. IHA is a non-profit organization that has a mission to assemble other heath care organization to collaborate on health care issues. The association conducts regional and statewide programs that help to assist in promoting health care programs and projects.

P4P

Health care pay for performance rewards physicians, hospitals and providers with money and non-financial strategies based on their performance (Berenson, 2010). The financial aspects cover various issues such as quality of clinic, adoption of technology and experience of patients. The sponsors of payment of performance are government agencies, insurance plans and health care providers. Most of Payment for performance programs have demonstrated improvement of clinical quality and have encouraged health providers to use systems of clinical health. P4P programs that have encouraged use of efficiency and quality services have experienced the advantage of cost savings. In addition, P4P services have shown improvements in patients’ experience. However, there are inevitable consequences that arise because of P4P. These include avoidance of complains from patients and handling patients with more than one health condition. However, there is no evidence on the above complains.

Research has shown that P4P programs have initiated change in behavior and have engaged provides. This program has assisted in follow up of patients conditions and has encouraged providers to adopt technology in health care. The program has also encouraged providers in improvement of health care services and collaborative learning has reduced unwanted practices.

There are new medical devices that have assisted in health care improvement and reduced death rates. However, these devices have also increased cost in healthcare (Berenson, 2010). These new medical services that are used and specialty of procedures used add quality to the hospital and services provided by the medical practioners. They also encourage adoption of health care technology and improvement of heath care insurance plans. Quality and efficiency is marked by better data collection and high standard benchmark on the prices of equipment both locally and internationally. In addition, there in improved purchasing of hospital equipment with the collaboration of physicians and provision of best services in the hospital. Lastly, there is advanced methods of payments where the incentives of the physicians and hospitals are bundled together.

Episode Payment

There is growing interest world wide in method of medical care treatment in connection to heath care policies. There are proposes on whether payment should be done on basis of episode care instead of the individual test or population based care (Kocher &Sahni, 2010). Coming up with a single budget of free care that involves many providers might bring quality and efficiency problems in connection to the current payment method. This is because there is increased imbursement and increased services that need payment. Pricing methods that involves bundling of various components of services might bring issues of transparency to the consumers. It is therefore important for the teams to make informed choices on selection of the provider team. IHA is conducting bundling payment of the services offered in California. This demonstration begun with bundling payment for knee and hipbone replacement.

Efficiency Measurement

There is a national wide campaign in private and government-sponsored hospitals in measurement of efficiency and increasing transparency in use of resources and cost of medical services. This will improve the quality of medical services and enhance improvement in health care. California stakeholders have an opportunity to adopt standardized measures and ensure there is efficiency development by using a collaborative report (Lee, Casalino, Fisher, 2010). Using standardized procedures and transparency in the cost is a method of creating a balanced and fair comparison on the physician group in connection to P4P. Even though measurement of efficiency and transparency might result to apprehension to those who are measured, it is good strategy for ensuring affordability in health care programs. The main goal of P4P efficiency measurement program is for lowering medical cost without compromising the quality of medical health care. This can be achieved through the development of a reliable and valid set of efficiency measures and establishing a trusted process of data collection and analysis. In addition, it is convenient to collaborate with other heath care plans for provision of meaningful incentives for provision of efficient health care delivery.

Conclusion

Integrated health care association (IHA) is a national wide health organization that provides quality, improvement and accountability health care in California. Health care pay for performance rewards physicians, hospitals and providers with money and non-financial strategies based on their performance. Research has shown that P4P programs have initiated change in behavior and have engaged provides. There are new medical devices that have assisted in health care improvement and reduced death rates. However, these devices have also increased cost in healthcare. There is growing interest world wide in method of medical care treatment in connection to heath care policies. There is a national wide campaign in private and government-sponsored hospitals in measurement of efficiency and increasing transparency in use of resources and cost of medical services.

References

Berenson, R. A. (2010). Shared Savings Program for Accountable Care Organizations: A Bridge to Nowhere? American Journal of Managed Care, 16 (10), 721-726. Retrieved on March 2013 from,

<http://www.ajmc.com/media/pdf/AJMC_10oct_Berenson_721to726.pdf>

Kocher R. &Sahni N. R. (2010).Physicians versus Hospitals as Leaders of Accountable Care Organizations. New England Journal of Medicine, 363(27), 2579-2582. Retrieved on March 25 2013 from,

<http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMp1011712>

Lee, T. H., Casalino, L. P., Fisher, E. S. &Wilensky, G. R. (2010).Creating Accountable Care Organizations.New England Journal of Medicine, 363 (15), e23. Retrieved on March 25 2013 from,

<http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1009040 (video) or http://www.nejm.org/doi/media/10.1056/NEJMp1009040/NEJMp1009040.pdf>