There are 19 item(s) tagged with the keyword "cost control".
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While growth in accountable care organizations has remained steady, employers are now turning their delivery reform efforts to two specialties: primary care and mental health. Employers are also expanding centers of excellence (COE) networks to address more conditions.
Although health care costs increased by only 3.6% in 2018, the lowest rise in decades, that trend is not expected to continue, according to the National Business Group on Health’s 2020 Health Care Strategy and Plan Design Survey. Large employers are expecting health care costs to rise 6% in 2020, lowered to 5% after cost management initiatives.
As the price of specialty drugs continues to rise at breathtaking speed, new therapies coming to market are even more expensive: Some have price tags exceeding $2 million per treatment. Large employers are increasingly worried about the sustainability of their pharmacy benefit.
Are we at the tipping point? Given the imperative for health care transformation and policies that go beyond coverage reshuffling and cost shifting, challenging the fundamental issues in health care and making it more affordable for all, will the industry transform itself? Will government play a leading role and cut through bureaucratic and political obstacles to real health reform?
Last week, 120 employers and industry leaders came together in Washington, DC for the NBGH Employers’ Summit on Health Care Costs & Solutions. Attendees had the opportunity to hear from Dr. Kathryn Phillips, founder and director of the UCSF Center for Translational and Policy Research on Personalized Medicine regarding the evolving landscape of genetic tests and treatments and the ways to evaluate their economic value.
With the new year came a federal mandate for hospitals across the country to release their chargemasters, or price lists, for all services offered at their facilities. What impact will this have on increasing price transparency for the average health care consumer? Will it help or hurt continued price transparency efforts?
The FDA approval and release of treatments for hepatitis C in late 2013 were a game changer in the treatment of this disease. But the price tags caught self-insured employers off guard. The launch of Sovaldi and other therapies paved the way towards a shorter and simplified means to a cure for these patients. This new class of specialty medications was both extremely promising and extremely expensive: for some, prohibitively so.
Health care costs are rising, and the new year will undoubtedly bring new challenges and more transformations. How do employers stay ahead of changes and keep costs low for our employees?
According to a study published this month, physicians estimate that 20.6% of overall medical care is unnecessary. Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine interviewed 2,106 doctors from across the United States, asking them about the prevalence and causes of overtreatment.
Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are being considered as one the key strategies in the next frontier of efforts to improve health care delivery and control health benefit costs. Roughly one in four large employers plan to pursue an ACO strategy in 2017 and that number is expected to grow in the coming years. However, employers have many questions about how ACOs deliver value better than the network models they offer today. To help employers better understand and evaluate ACOs in their markets, two groundbreaking tools have been released by the National Business Group on Health.
Displaying: 1 - 10 of 19