The buzz in health care for hospitals and health insurance companies these days is outcomes- and evidence-based medicine. If the deepest cost-cutting proposals of health care reform on the table in D.C. come to pass, doctors, hospitals and essentially any company that delivers direct medical care services could eventually be held to a set of standards set by companies who compile results of controlled research studies about patient protocols and disease management practices that deliver the best possible physical outcome.
Under this system, if a doctor doesn’t follow the protocols, medical health insurance companies don’t pay the bill.
UnitedHealthcare became the first major health carrier to announce its intent to dollect data from doctors and share it amongst all their contracted providers. Beginning today, United’s Oncology Care Analysis is aggregating data from more than 2,600 oncologists and 8,600 patients diagnosed with breast, colon or lung cancer. After the data is analyzed against an alliance of 21 participating U.S. cancer centers, known as the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCNN), it’s distributed to United’s network providers as a soft mandate at this point in time, to follow the recommendations when treating patients with similar medical demographics.
United is billing the reports as a way to help improve the quality of cancer care by showing how well a particular patient is complying with their medications or sharing inromation about procedures performed by other specialists. At this point, the medical sata sharing initiative will be limited to United’s cancer patient group — which accounts for $2.5 billion of United’s annual spending.
Tags: Evidence-Based Medicine, health insurance companies, Medical Health Insurance, UnitedHealthcare
