Reflection - Part 6: ACOs and PCMH

From Yue:

One possible downside of ACO is that healthcare providers may reluctant to accept vulnerable patients to prevent high-risk patients from jeopardizing the group’s ability to earn shared savings payments. And I am also curious about how the physician group treats different ethnicity group, or poverty level (e.g. African Americans, patients live in areas with high poverty and unemployment rates). This could spell trouble for vulnerable patients despite the belief that downside risk adoption will lead to greater quality improvements and lower spending. But I have to say, I think ACO is a good way to motivate healthcare workers in general.

From Xiruo:

I love the the subtitle of a blog I read, commenting on failure of PCMH by Kip Sullivan: A laundry list of aspirations is not a plan. This is exactly what I feel when I am browsing either NCQA or AHRQ’s website for details of PCMH, including what exactly they mean by those “fundamentals”, what are some tools and procedures to help implement PCMH, what is a good evaluation method for PCMH (I see they paid Mathematica Policy Research for an evaluation guide, titled as A Guide to Real-World Evaluations of Primary Care Interventions: Some Practical Advice)… Also as pointed out by Hahn et al, “Adapting the recognition criteria to include measures that are meaningful to practices as well as pushing insurers to provide incentives to NCQA-recognized PCMHs would change the recognition process from a check-the-box formality to a genuine practice transformation.”

From Jake:

I personally really liked this assignment. The PCMH is a cool topic and the article that we went over on the topic on the future of HIT in the PCMH in class was an interesting read. It really seems like informatics will play a key role in the future of PCMH's. I wrote about the future of the PCMH, but the article/graphic led me to the use of computational linguistics and machine learning to reduce adverse drug events. I got to read a pretty hefty paper I've been meaning to read for quite some time called Classification by Analogy which is not only pertinent to the future of the EHR in the PCMH but is also pertinent to the research I'm doing on ade's for mental health drugs. I really got into the weeds with this paper, but I do think it would be understandable for the NLP audience we are going for. I found this assignment to be one of the most enjoyable assignments we've had and I like what our group put together.