The Response to Brittany Maynard

By Lauren Taylor

29-year old Brittany Maynard has captured national headlines this week by publicly announcing her intention to end her own life on November 1st. She did so in an effort to raise funds for and awareness of the non-profit Compassion and Choices.

Maynard was diagnosed earlier this year with an aggressive brain cancer and has moved to Oregon for access to its death with dignity laws. Those laws have allowed her to be prescribed a fatal dose of medication by a physician to be taken at the time and place of her choosing. Maynard sees the prescription as a means of avoiding a potentially long, painful and de-humanizing decline in her health.

In light of Maynard’s case, virtually every major media outlet has featured a bit of medical ethics this week. Maynard’s own voice first appeared in People Magazine, announcing her intention to end her own life.  Therein, Maynard is clear that she does not consider herself to be planning for suicide.  Read More

How much promise do safety-net ACOs really hold?

The Health Affairs blog recently published an important write-up of the status of safety net ACOs. Therein, authors James Maxwell, Michael Bailit, Rachel Toby and Christine Barron offer five “key observations regarding emerging safety-net ACOs and suggest broad policy implications” which are drawn from what appears to be a fairly extensive research project including “site visits and telephone interviews with 66 safety-net ACO leaders and state officials conducted over the last two years in 14 states.” Generally, they leave the reader with an optimistic impression of safety-net ACOs efforts to achieve population health – which contrasts with my previous post on Bill of Health.

In short, the authors offer the following observations:

  1. State policy is a key factor in the formation of safety-net ACOs.
  2. Both health policy experts and those involved in forming ACOs consider health homes, high-cost case management, and integrated behavioral health to be priority delivery system transformations for ACOs in the safety-net.
  3. It takes money to save money: upfront capital and financial flexibility are required for investment in delivery system transformations.
  4. Safety-net ACOs are adopting payment and delivery system transformations incrementally.
  5. Building on a long-standing recognition of how non-medical factors impact health outcomes and utilization, safety-net ACOs are addressing social determinants of health through community partnerships.

The entirety of the post is well-written and I encourage folks to check it out for themselves. My concerns about the ACO model do still largely hold, however. While the authors of this blog highlight four states (MA, OR, AL and MN) with policies on the books to encourage creativity in safety-net ACO design, that leaves 46 others without such supportive legislation. In short, I think we are still working at the margins here. Moreover, I worry that the authors have chosen a definition of ACO that goes well beyond what CMS considers to be an ACO and in so doing have spotlighted “bright lights” of the health care delivery landscape that may not have the metrics and results to support their claims at innovation. The authors offer us little information about what kind of improvements either in quality of care or health outcomes these safety-net ACOs have been able to achieve. (Meanwhile, CMS recently released the latest quality metrics on the Pioneer and Shared Savings ACOs they sanction and monitor.)

The bottom line is this: safety-net ACOs, like all ACOs, certainly hold promise. The question is whether we will translate this promise into systems-level change.

What’s to become of population health?

When the accountable care organization (ACO) model was initially conceptualized, many in the health policy world hoped it could provide a platform for real transformation of US health care.

Among the ACO model’s most promising innovations was its explicit orientation towards achieving “the Triple Aim.” First articulated by Don Berwick and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the Triple Aim is a strategy for optimizing the health care delivery system and achieving the best of all worlds. It outlines three goals: high quality health care, lower costs, and population health. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services adopted this goal and still describes a version of the Triple Aim on its webpage titled “Innovation.”

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Introducing the 2014-2015 Petrie-Flom Student Fellows

The Petrie-Flom Center is pleased to welcome our new 2014-2015 Student Fellows. In the coming year, each fellow will pursue independent scholarly projects related to health law policy, biotechnology, and bioethics under the mentorship of Center faculty and fellows. They will also be regular contributors here at Bill of Health on issues related to their research.

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