“[Introduction] [..] population-based payment models, as in the Medicare Shared Savings Program or Medicare Advantage (MA) program, can facilitate the resource reallocations necessary to address health care disparities. Risk adjustment is the mechanism by which payment is allocated in these models. Traditionally, risk adjustment has been conceived and executed purely as a predictive exercise. Regression is used to predict total annual per person spending as a function of demographic and clinical characteristics. A person’s predicted spending is converted to a risk score, which is applied to a base regional rate to determine the prospective payment or benchmark for that person. … Read More
All posts by Anupam
“By the 1990s, worsening patterns of population health began to raise concerns about their association with these changes in the global political economy. The sharp rise in non-communicable diseases, now accounting for 74% of deaths worldwide, were difficult to explain solely as related to individual behavioural choices. The links between population health outcomes, the strategies and products of corporations, and the political contexts that facilitate such practices began to receive closer scrutiny. Over the next two decades, detailed analyses of an increasingly globalised tobacco industry, enabled by a flood of internal documents into the public domain, were followed by similar … Read More
“we examine real-world data from a cohort based in a UK primary care clinic offering a low-carbohydrate approach to people with T2D [type 2 diabetes] from 2013 to 2021. The physiological mechanisms behind remission induced by dietary weight loss were first demonstrated in 2011. Since then the idea of drug-free T2D remission has gained international momentum. [..] Advice on lowering dietary carbohydrate was offered routinely by our team of nine specially trained GPs and three practice nurses to patients with T2D (defined as HbA1c >48 mmol/mol on two occasions) starting in March 2013. Our protocol includes important information around the deprescribing of … Read More
“[Authority Magazine’s Jake Frankel] can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits of having a patient in front of you? [Co-founder and CMO of HealthTap Geoff Rutledge] The most important point to emphasize is that the essential physician–patient interaction is direct face-to-face communication that allows a doctor to connect with their patient, engage with them, and enable them to share in detail what is going on with their lives and their health. And that this critical face-to-face communication can occur equally well either in an in-person, in-office setting or via high-resolution video and audio consultation. It’s … Read More
“In its attempt to explode particular myths, however, Myth America engages in its own mythmaking. The book fundamentally misunderstands the crises facing the U.S. and the world. By implying that misinformation is the principal cause of the partisan rancor, violence, and general dysfunction that mark our current political moment, the collection obscures our much bigger problems. And by localizing the threat of misinformation and disinformation almost exclusively within certain far-right segments of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, Myth America absolves not only other stripes of conservatism, but also the milquetoast technocratic liberalism that helped set the stage for this moment. It’s not … Read More
“[Introduction] According to the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017, unhealthy diet is estimated as one of the leading causes of death globally. [..] using 2 large prospective cohorts with data on repeated measures of dietary habits, we derived dietary scores for 4 healthy dietary patterns, including the Healthy Eating Index 2015 (HEI-2015), Alternate Mediterranean Diet (AMED) score, Healthful Plant-based Diet Index (HPDI), and Alternate Healthy Eating Index (AHEI). We then examined their associations with total and cause-specific mortality. We also specifically examined these associations stratified by race and ethnicity and other potential risk factors. [Methods] This cohort study used … Read More
Ezra Klein of the New York Times interviewed Gary Marcus, emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at NYU. “[Klein] [..] one of your pieces where you say GPT-3, which is the system underneath ChatGPT, is the king of pastiche. What is pastiche, first, and what do you mean by that? [Marcus] It’s a kind of glorified cut and paste. Pastiche is putting together things kind of imitating a style. [..] There’s also a kind of template aspect to it. So it cuts and pastes things, but it can do substitutions, things that paraphrase. So you have A and B … Read More
“driven by an increasing focus on “total-cost value-based care” — a model in which health care providers are paid to manage the total cost of care for their patients and the size of each patient’s capitated budget may be increased on the basis of the patient’s health risks and the provider’s performance on quality metrics. Though potentially beneficial for certain well-insured patients, the trend of corporate investment in primary care could threaten equitable access to care, raise health care costs, and reduce physicians’ clinical autonomy. [..] As Medicare and commercial payers move toward total-cost value-based payments, such as capitation, and … Read More
“Professional sport has been criticised for its role as a vehicle to market addictive products or services. Despite the harmful health effects on society, football audiences are inured to seeing sponsors of such products not only on pitch-side hoardings and shirts, but also embedded in television rights, competition names, prematch build-up, corporate hospitality, and social media. Tobacco’s successful movement into sports sponsorship established the template on which other addictive sponsors, notably the alcohol and gambling industries, built their strategies. The integration of sports and addictive commodities highlights strategies to influence consumption by those within the unhealthy commodities industry. [..] historically … Read More
“There are 3 main takeaways from the existing research on the rule. First, the compliance rates have been low. In March 2021, a random sample of 100 hospitals indicated that only 33% reported the negotiated commercial prices for some services. [..] In response to the low compliance, the CMS raised the penalty for noncompliant hospitals to $300 per day for small hospitals and up to $5500 per day for large hospitals beginning from January 1, 2022. Despite the steeper penalties, the compliance rate remains low. For example, Gul et al note that as of March 2022, only 29% to 56% … Read More