disease management programs

Press Release: DMAA Releases Consensus Guidelines on Measuring Outcomes

> U.K. general practitioners got a 30 percent annual salary boost this year, spurred by pay for performance incentives. Article

> A bill traveling through the New Jersey legislature would expand the mental health and substance abuse benefits state insurers must provide. Article

> A family has sued the …

When CDHPs offer health promotion and wellness incentives, they can succeed in making a positive impact on members' health behaviors, according to a newly-released study by insurance brokerage and consulting firm Aon. The study analyzed plans provided by South Africa's Discovery Health and subsidiaries, including U.S.-based Destiny Health, covering more than two million lives.

Among other conclusions, the study found that monetary, vacation and merchandise rewards for desirable …

> Back in the saddle again! HealthSouth begins trading on the NYSE once more. Article

> The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is distributing new clinical preventative guidelines. …

California Medical Association (CMA), the state's largest physician group, has released a report ranking the state's insurers by the percentage of their budget spent on healthcare in 2005. The ranking is part of the group's campaign to get insurance companies to spend more money on medical costs--including doctor's reimbursements--and less on profits and overhead. Blue Cross of California (California's largest insurer) ranked the lowest. The insurer spent 78.9 percent of their revenue on …

Reminding diabetic patients to come in for foot and retinal exams gets them into the office all right, but standard diabetes disease-management strategies don't seem to do much for controlling key factors like blood sugar, blood pressure or cholesterol, or for getting patients to take their medications properly, according to a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Researchers from the UCLA School of Public Health studied 8,661 patients from 63 physician groups in several …

> Medical journals are under fire for not asking their authors about financial ties to the subjects of their papers. Last week it was JAMA, revealing that the authors of an article on depression during pregnancy had been paid by an antidepressant maker. This week the journal Neuropsychopharmacology admits it failed to mention that its own editor is a consultant to a company that makes a treatment reviewed favorably in the journal's pages. …

The behavior of health insurers is back in the news in a big way this week. As premiums have gone up and as health insurer profits have gone up even more, the reputation of health insurers as measured in public opinion polls has stayed just above that of the tobacco companies. Now one of the nation's giants, Wellpoint's Blue Cross unit, is accused of canceling the policies of people …

Kaiser Permanente will launch a new subsidiary to market its disease management programs to companies outside of its network. The spin off will be called Kaiser Permanente Healthy Solutions. Chris Stenzel has been named CEO of the new corporation. KP Healthy Solutions will work with large employers to analyze claims data and offer specialized programs in chronic care management. Kaiser, which has worked to develop its programs for many years, becomes the latest large health plan to enter the field.

- see this article from the East Bay Business Times

A 17-year federal study has found evidence that closely monitoring blood sugar levels helps reduce the risks that people with Type I diabetes will suffer heart attacks or strokes, something doctors had long suspected. The research, which appears in the NEJM today, finds that people who tightly control their blood sugar levels are about fifty percent less likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes. The news is expected to encourage changes in clinical practice and encourage …