May 30, 2011 in Media Center, News by admin

GP Lectures Offers Doctors a New Way of Learning

GP Lectures provides lectures streamed from the internet, allowing GPs to select a personal training programme to reflect their own learning needs. There are currently 80 different videos to choose from with more being added daily, including practice management topics and lectures recorded by hospital consultants. Leading medical experts feature in the videos including Doctor Willy Notcutt, Chair of the British Pain Society Philosophy and Ethics SIG. Also, Dr Paul Guyler, Advisor to The National Priority Project for Stroke Prevention. And Professor Garry John, Chair of the IFCC Working Group on Standardization of HbA1c.

Each lecture is filmed in a professional television studio and lasts approximately 20 minutes with hour-long screenings split into shorter videos. All users receive certification as evidence of learning and this counts towards CPD points at Revalidation. The new service was the brainchild of Doctor Gary Rogers who identified that online medical lectures could help with the growing requirement for doctors to continually update their knowledge. He adds; “This is an exciting opportunity for GP’s to take their education into their own hands and decide on the time and place of their learning.

I believe online technology will play an ever-increasing role in medical education, offering an alternative to traditional large-group lectures. The service is extremely conveniant as it allows doctors to be in complete control of what lectures they watch – fitting their learning around their reflective needs.” With over 1000 users registered to http://www.GPLectures.co.uk since it went live, more lectures are being added daily. Dr Philippe Grunstein who features in the lectures, adds; “GPLectures provides fantastic material for GPs and certainly for the junior Doctors from SHOs to SpRs. Consultants would enjoy it as well as it’s a great tool to update their knowledge out of their specialty.”

The e-lectures can be viewed on desktops and laptops and can also be screened to multiple audiences, benefiting the entire medical practice. Lectures are all priced at £10 per hour, depending on their length and registered GPs can watch them repeatedly for no extra cost at a single sitting. Medical students have free, limited access to the service.

May 30, 2011 in Media Center, News by admin

Successful Physician Alignment

By Dr. Michael G. Cassatly

The Affordable Care Act encourages the formation of ACO’s where the participants in a patient’s care will share the payment for treating a patient based on the patient’s outcome success. So, rather than pay hospitals, physicians, and other ACO members for their individual portion of a patient’s treatment, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will instead pay one lump sum to all the involved participants for the bundle of services encompassing the entire episode of a patient’s care. Thus, the financial reward and the risk are shared collectively by all members of the ACO…….. each individually must succeed in order for all to succeed. For example, a substandard performance by a single provider causing the patient’s outcome success to fall below the CMS benchmark will reduce the amount of money received by the ACO. Consequently, a poor performance by one member of the ACO, affects the profitability for all members of the ACO.

Due to this shared risk and reward, in the current issue of the Journal of Medical Practice Management1, I have proposed a new term to better define the ACO business structure. The term, Stakeholder Partners, is defined as a mutually beneficial relationship in which the organization and the stakeholder must partner in order for each to succeed.

In the article, I discuss the critical and fundamental contrasts between physicians and other ACO members. Specifically, physicians are a group of individual heterogeneous entrepreneurs that tend not to act in a collective manner. This is in distinct antithesis to the other possible ACO members, such as hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical device, and yes, even medical insurance companies. These ACO members are well organized businesses with established strategic plans, communication systems and efficiency metrics.

May 30, 2011 in Media Center, News by admin

Back to the Future: What Lies Ahead?

By Tim Sosbe

Every now and then I like to stop and think about the future. Or maybe more accurately, the potential future.

No matter what the folks on the Psychic Friends Network want you to believe, no one can truly and completely predict the future. Certain tuned-in people might be able to make educated guesses based on available information, but no one has told me yet what I’ll eat for breakfast on June 11, 2013, or who I’m going to vote for in 2016. I also don’t really know what the next big innovation in learning technology will bring, and I most certainly don’t know what innovation that innovation will spawn (though I am sure that cascade of progress will happen).

This all reminds me of James Taylor. No, not that James Taylor … there’s a futurist working in this industry with the same name as the famed singer/songwriter, and I heard him keynote at a conference several years back. I still remember one great line: “A futurist is someone who makes predictions so far in the future he can’t possibly be held accountable for their accuracy.”

Funny stuff, no doubt in part because it’s so true. I could make all kinds of pronouncements right here and right now, but are you really going to remember in 20 years? If so, I can just cite unforeseen market conditions that impacted my predictions … give it another 20 years, I’ll say.

I started thinking about all this again after seeing a recent issue of USA Today, with a “Snapshots” feature showing failed futurist predictions.

May 30, 2011 in Media Center, News by admin

Coaching Physicians to Communicate with Patients

By Dr. Michael G. Cassatly

I think it is safe to say that most patients feel physicians are not good communicators. In fact, many patients even feel that their own physician’s communication skills just plain stink! So, beginning in fiscal year 2013, how will Physicians capture the incentive bonus mandated by the Affordable Healthcare Act, when 30% of it is based on physicians and nurses communication skills? Let’s take a closer look at the incentive bonus and then, I will present a blue print for your hospital to maximize the incentive.

There are two important elements of the incentive: the source of the funds and the metrics determining if your hospital receives the incentive. The money to pay the incentive comes from a corresponding 1% holdback reduction in payments by CMS to your institution. Yes, you read that correctly. CMS is cutting back your inpatient reimbursement by 1% and then, may return it to you as an incentive for meeting predetermined benchmarks! So to even receive a 100% of the full Diagnosis Related Group (DRG) payment, you better reach the benchmarks. But wait, it gets better. The incentive and the holdback increase by yearly .25% increments to reach a full 2% in 2017. Falling short will result in a failure to capture the incentive with a full 2% decrease in reimbursement. Let’s assume your healthcare system’s total reimbursement from CMS is $100 million, then, 2% is $2 million dollars……….not money any medical center can afford to leave on the table. And, since private insurers uniformly adopt CMS payment models, the potential revenue loss will be even greater once private insurers enact similar incentive payment plans.

The metrics determining the incentive payment are called the Total Performance Score (TPS). 70% of the TPS will be determined by clinical processes of care. What I call “hard data” because it is quantifiable. Along with the urgency for electronic medical records, this quantifiable data is driving the resources going into healthcare information technology. The remaining 30% will be based on eight patient experiences of care measures from the HCAHPS survey. I call this “soft data” because it is based on your patients’ subjective opinions. This patient’s opinion poll measures the communication abilities of your physicians and nurses, as well as overall responsiveness of the hospital staff. It is this soft data I want to discuss.

First, recognize it for what it is: a HUGE culture change. And like any culture change it will take some time. So Rule #1 is to start the change now. Rule #2 is to start from the top down. That means the physicians; the leaders in your chain of command must become “change agents” by modeling effective communication with patients and staff. Rule #3: because changes in a culture must be system-wide, get all your hospital personnel on board. It will do no good to have your physicians connecting with patients if nurses and the other staff do not. And Rule #4 is to have your physicians undergo business coaching with an experienced coach who understands physicians. A hospital HR employee calling her or himself a ‘coach’ after a day of training can do more harm than good by not fully engaging your physicians. An experienced and certified coach who knows physicians is the requisite to a fundamental culture change. As mentioned in my previous posts, clients of executive business coaching report an improvement in relationships, communication skills, interpersonal skills, and work performance by greater than 70%. So don’t delay begin your culture change today!