physician groups

Tired of being rated by insurance plans, government agencies and consumers? Well, if you're a family physician, here's your chance to create your own scorecard. The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has set plans to launch what it calls a "massive" payer report card, grading the plans on their contracting process, customer service, payment rates, claims processing performance, formulary, responsiveness and more, assigning a grade from A to F. AAFP is collecting the responses …

> The shuttered and crumbling Cook County Hospital in Chicago (known nationally as the face of "ER") meets two criteria to be a national historic landmark, says a city commission. It's been the site of historic events and has a terrific terra cotta Beaux Arts facade. There's been a fight over the building since the new Stroger Hospital opened nearby in 2002, but a landmark designation might save the structure for alternative uses. …

Blue Cross of California is paying 178 physician groups an extra $65 million this year under a pay-for-performance program that rewards high quality in a number of areas, including patient satisfaction, waiting times for appointments, number of complaints and grievances, and review of medical group or IPA functions. Performance in clinical areas was tracked, too, including managing chronic diseases such as asthma and diabetes and adherence to screening guidelines for breast and cervical …

Five Staten Island doctors are suing the Health Insurance Plan of New York, claiming that HIP has interfered in their relationships with their patients. Their practice, the Staten Island Medical Group, was dissolved in May after being taken over by PivotHealth, a Brentwood, TN-based physician practice management company. PivotHealth, on contract with HIP, was providing administrative services to Staten Island Medical. The practice was subsequently re-formed as the Staten Island Physicians …

A long-running concern of Congress, analysts and physician groups is that decreased Medicare reimbursements will prevent physicians from accepting Medicare beneficiaries. The concern came to the forefront in 2002 when fees were reduced by 5.4 percent and have continued as healthcare costs outpace reimbursement rates.

Now a GAO report finds that reimbursement has little impact on beneficiaries' access to doctors. The report asked beneficiaries whether or not they had difficulty …

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 …

At the TEPR (Towards the Electronic Patient Record) conference this week, EMR fans were reminded that this movement is now more than a quarter of a century old, yet hasn't exactly seen great success in the U.S. Attendees were also warned that spending money without planning and without involving doctors may lead to great disappointment. A senior representative of the AMA said that …

Tenet Healthcare said that it has reached an agreement with federal officials to settle charges that it used kickback payments to doctors to encourage them to refer patients. The hospital chain will pay a fine of $21 million. The Dallas-based provider has also agreed to either sell or shut down Alvarado Medical Center. Federal prosecutors had charged that the hospital improperly used payments to physician groups as an incentive to encourage them to refer patients. Tenet shares rallied up …

> Medicare Part D plans that drop drugs from their forumalaries will be required to continue providing them to existing customers who take the drugs. Article

> A Massachusetts-style health initiative would cost California about $9.4 billion, according to new research sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation. …

We've been hearing a great deal about price transparency in healthcare. California has a new law mandating that hospitals release their chargemaster billing data. The Administration's advisors are demanding that hospitals and doctors reveal pricing, and one health plan (Aetna) has revealed its negotiated rates with physicians in one market (Cincinnati). The theory is that pricing …