Content by Keyword: Medicare

Abt Associates Inc. (1997). Medicare Cataract Surgery Alternate Payment Demonstration: Final Evaluation Report . Cambridge, M.A. American Geriatrics Society (AGS) (2007). "Improving the Quality of Transitional Care for Persons with Complex Care Needs: American Geriatrics Society Position Statement." Assited Living Consult March/April: 30-32.

Defining Professional Claims for the Purposes of Attribution Under a narrow definition professional services are care directly rendered by a physician or related provider. This definition therefore excludes pharmacy, facility, and direct medical equipment.   Broader definitions might include these services.

(as of 12/08/2008, includes measures for 2009 reporting) Figure E1. Settings Involved in Episodes: AMI (MEGS)

Average payments were standardized for each setting based on 2005 payment rates and payment policy to exclude variation in resource use due to geographic factors (i.e., area wages, geographic differences in medical liability costs, and urban/rural status) and policy considerations (i.e., indirect medical education (IME), and disproportionate share

Condition ETGs (version 6.0) MEGs Acute myocardial infarction 386500: Ischemic heart disease 11: Acute myocardial infarction Bacterial pneumonia 437400: Bacterial lung infections 510: Pneumonia: bacterial Breast cancer (limited to women) 635600: Malignant neoplasm of breast 212: Neoplasm, malignant: breast, female

MaCurdy, Thomas, Jason Kerwin, Jonathan Gibbs, Eugene Lin, Carolyn Cotterman, Margaret O'Brien-Strain and Nick Theobald. 2008. "Evaluating the Functionality of the Symmetry ETG and Medstat MEG Software in Forming Episodes of Care Using Medicare Data." Burlingame, CA: Acumen, LLC.

Regardless of whether a Medicare claim comes from an institutional or non-institutional source, the MEG grouper accepts one input record per claim.

To create episodes of care, Symmetry inputs service-level records with each input record containing information on a single service item and up to four diagnoses per record. These records also include data on dates of service. Services are always identified on an institutional claim (IP, OP, SNF, HH and HS claims) by a revenue center code, and if

The episode groupers utilize the primary diagnosis on claim line items to create and place the line items into episode. Only certain types of claims, as determined by procedure and revenue codes, can start an episode such as evaluation and management procedure codes, surgery procedure codes or specific inpatient facility revenue code.

Condition ICD-9 diagnosis codes How selected Source for dx codes Acute myocardial infarction 410.xx (only first for second Dx on the claim At least 1 inpatient claim with DX code during 1 year period CMS Chronic Care Warehouse Bacterial pneumonia 481.xx-483.xx (any Dx on claim)

There is an absence of solid empirical work related to and few real-world applications of episode-based approaches that provide guidance on how best to construct and apply episodes of care in the context of performance measurement and/or payment policy.  The work done within this project was exploratory in nature and represents only a first step

Using a building block approach, one could build an episode by starting narrowly to reflect the services delivered by one provider in a single setting for a specific illness or injury, then expand more broadly to reflect the services delivered in a single setting by multiple providers (such as the physician and the hospital during an inpatient sta

A large proportion of episodes involved care delivered in multiple states, suggesting potential challenges for care coordination and creating accountable groups of providers for an episode when they are not geographically proximate.  Out-of-state care, particularly when not geographically promixate, could likely make it more difficult to coordin

The mean number of total episodes of all types per beneficiary varied widely among the three states in our analysis, averaging 6.1 episodes per beneficiary in Oregon, 6.9 in Texas, and 8.0 in Florida.  In our analyses, average 2005 per-capita payments were highest in Florida and Texas ($8,380 and $8,432, respectively) and lowest in Oregon ($5,87

The published literature finds that different methods for attributing episodes of care to providers have yielded different results, in terms of which physicians are assigned responsibility and what proportion of episodes can be assigned.  Our analyses of Medicare data produced similar results in terms of variability.  However, it is notable th

For most of the nine study conditions examined, the condition-related episodes involved a median of one PCP (meaning half of the episodes for any given condition involved only one PCP).  Episodes related to AMI involved a median of two PCPs, and episodes related to breast cancer and low back pain involved a median of zero PCPs. 34   For episode

Our analyses examined the number of settings and types of providers that were involved in episodes related to the nine study conditions.

Among the episodes that were related to the nine study conditions, there was substantial variation in average standardized payments, [33] both across episode types and among different episodes of the same type. Per episode average payments for ETGs related to the nine study conditions ranged from an average of $1,306 (episodes related to diabete

The Medicare beneficiaries for the nine conditions we examined had an average of 10 episodes during the year, and the majority of episodes were unrelated to the condition that was used as a criterion for inclusion of the beneficiary in this study.  Most episodes were of varying types (i.e. not repeated occurrence of the same type of episode). �