Public Learning about ACOs

"Culture beats strategy every time" is a truism in management consultation. The Accountable Care Organization concept is excellent...

Accountable Care Sprints Ahead

A recent report from the Oliver Wyman consulting firm - " The ACO Surprise " - argues that ACOs are on the verge of triggering a ...

Goldman Sachs, Corporate Culture, and Medical Ethics

When Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, and head of the firm's US equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle Eas...

Zeke Emanuel on Health Reform

Zeke Emanuel provides an excellent piece of public education about the potential for improved quality of care and cost savings in a recent N...

The Ethics of Palliative Psychotherapy

Michael Kahn, a psychiatrist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has an excellent short article on "Palliative Psyc...

Improving Health Care at Hospitals

Methods for Improving Health Care in the Hospital The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have required hospitals to start reporting on qualit...

Accountable Care Medicare Shared Savings Rules and How they Benefit Consumers

Accountable Care Organizations and Medicare Shared Savings Program The federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes...

Concierge Medicine

Yesterday the Boston Globe reported that two of the most respected physicians at the Newton Wellesley Hospital, five miles from where I liv...

Pain Control, Hypnosis, and Medical Ethics

Two years ago I wrote about self-directed hypnosis as a effective and ethically admirable clinical intervention. A recent New York times ar...

Pumping out Prescriptions

A story on the front page of today's New York Times caught my eye - "Talk Doesn't Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug The...

Can Patients Trust Accountable Care Organizations?

The 1990s version of managed care 1.0 crashed and burned because of distrust. Physicians distrusted the utilization review systems and payme...

Academic Medical Centers, ACOs, and Medical Ethics

The February 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine features two articles about Accountable Care Organizations at Academic Medical C...

Single Payer Proposal in Vermont

On May 27, 2010 Vermont Act 128 - "An act relating to health care financing and universal access to health care in Vermont" - was...

Drugging America

In the December issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, an article on "National Trends in Outpatient Psychotherapy" and an a...

Governor Patrick Throws Down the Gauntlet on ACOs

Two days ago I described the current moment in Massachusetts Health Care Reform as "crunch time," with a number of tough choices ...

Crunch Time in Massachusetts for Cost Containment and ACOs

The time has come for Massachusetts to walk the talk of health care reform. We've done a good job with the easier part - increasing acce...

Making Accountable Care Organizations Acceptable to the Public

The most recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine has a valuable article about the "Patient's Role in Accountable Care ...

Medical Group Growth and Expansion

I recently met with a physician leader in a group that is expanding through merger with another group. He was interested in my direct experi...

ACOs, Rationing, and Medical Ethics

Magic bullets come and go in the world of health policy, but the accountable care organization (ACO) is likely to be a durable reform. Excep...

Medical Homes, Patient Empowerment, or Both

There are two main beliefs in U.S. policy circles about how to improve health care quality and contain costs - strengthening the role of pri...