Health Quality Assurance Article Reviews

Posted: October 17th, 2013

Health Quality Assurance Article Reviews

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Health Quality Assurance Article Reviews

Primary Care

“New Affordable Care Act Tools Offer Incentives for Providers to Work Together When Caring for People with Medicare”

In the article specified above, a new program aims at achieving coordination between primary medical specialists, hospitals, and patients with Medicare. The program has been designed to eliminate lack of coordination between various hospitals, primary care doctors and their patients. The program aim to achieve this through helping the parties involved, especially different doctors with mutual patients in taking care of the patients jointly. The main point with this program is to offer financial support to hospitals, doctors and other medical service providers a chance to labor communally in an effort to enhance the primary care of the patients (HealthCare.gov, 2011).

The new program, Accountable Care Organization, establishes new rules that are categorized into four spheres namely, patient experience, care coordination and patient wellbeing, caring for the at-risk peoples, and preventive health (HealthCare.gov, 2011). New rules of this program establish a Medical Shared Saving Program aimed at assisting the health care providers with an opportunity to coordinate their services across many health care settings. The goals of the program are to improve patient care, improve health care coordination, save on costs while maximizing care, improve service through an advanced payment model, and facilitate the Accountable Care Organization through antitrust guidance for the health care providers (HealthCare.gov, 2011).

Care for patents will be improved through improving partnership between the providers so that patients do not have to provide medical same reports to several doctors. Rather, doctors can coordinate and exchange information through a coordinated program about a patient. Providers will be assisted to coordinate care through partnership of patients, bundled payments assisting patients to pay few bills. Through the Medicare communal investments scheme, patients with Medicare can receive services from any setting, whether home, hospital or in a doctor’s office. Advanced payment model seeks to enable teams of health providers in enhancing services for recipients and producing Medicare investments. Finally, the antitrust guidance aims to provide the providers with practical guidance on innovative and integrated health care (HealthCare.gov, 2011).

“Grants for Primary and Behavioral Health Care Integration (Short title: PBHCI)”

The article stated above is about a program aimed at improving physical health of mentally ill people. It aims to achieve this through, “sustaining communities to synchronize and incorporate primary care services into overtly funded community mental wellbeing and other community-based behavioral fitness settings,” (samhsa.gov, 2008). The program seeks to build a partnership between primary health care and mental care as well as building the infrastructure needed. The intended outcome is to develop and expand primary health care for mentally ill persons by the grantees, which would consequently lead to improved mental health (Thielke, Vannoy & Unützer, 2007).

This program recognizes that physical health will have impact on the lives of mentally ill people, which often leads to premature deaths. The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors provided a report indicating the extent of this relation, showing that people with grave mental infirmity have a mortality that is 25 lower than those individuals who do not exhibit the same infirmities. The biggest factor contributing to this disparity is shortage of direct medical services for these individuals. Thus, the program aims at solving this to improve the health of mentally ill persons. In addition, people with serious mental health illnesses are at higher risk of other health conditions such as hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases in contrast to individuals who do not exhibit severe mental infirmity. Some of these conditions are heightened by other practices such as substance abuse, and some side effects of psychiatric treatment. This can be taken care of through primary care monitoring and treatment. Thus, by accepting the a grant to build a partnership of mental and primary care services, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration will improve the health of mentally ill persons (samhsa.gov, 2008).

References

HealthCare.gov. (2011). New Affordable Care Act Tools Offer Incentives for Providers to Work Together When Caring for People with Medicare. Retrieved from http://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/2011/10/accountable-care10202011a.html

samhsa.gov. (2008). Grants for Primary and Behavioral Health Care Integration (Short title: PBHCI). Retrieved from http://www.samhsa.gov/grants/2009/sm_09_011.aspx

Thielke, S., Vannoy, S. & Unützer, J. (2007). Integrating mental health and primary care. Prim Care, 34(3): 571-592, vii.