The Buffalo News
NEW YORK IS MIDWAY THROUGH MONUMENTAL MEDICAID REDESIGN
New York is midway through a monumental initiative begun in 2011 to redesign the costly Medicaid program, the largest purchaser of health services in the state for its 6.2 million beneficiaries. Jason Helgerson, director of the state’s Medicaid program, stopped in Buffalo to talk about the effort. He also repeated his warnings that the GOP health care bill that has advanced to the Senate, the American Health Care Act, could have a dire impact on patients, hospitals, and taxpayers.
Twenty-five groups, including Millennium Collaborative Care and Community Partners of Western New York, have formed across the state to establish projects to cut avoidable hospital stays and emergency room visits.Helgerson said the groups have made progress, but now face the much more difficult task of actually achieving their goals, including reducing costs, improving health care outcomes and moving to value-based payments. Some of the groups at the end of the initiative in 2020 will have qualified for as much funding as possible for their projects and will be done with their work, he said. Others, he added, will use money from the Medicaid redesign initiative to achieve a broader goal of working toward reform of the larger health system in their communities. Read More…
The New York Times
STRATEGIES TO NAVIGATE THE EMERGENCY ROOM
Each year some 120 million Americans go to an emergency room, a number that increases annually even as more hospitals close their E.R.s (there are now 22 percent fewer than 20 years ago). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average wait time before seeing a physician is 55 minutes, but the wait could easily exceed several hours on a busy night or weekend. The most important fact every E.R. visitor should know is that true medical emergencies — patients with a potentially life-threatening problem like a heart attack, stroke, respiratory distress or uncontrolled bleeding — take precedence over a broken bone, headache or stomach pain. Read More…