Faturamento Hospitalar aplicado ao serviço de parto: modelo alternativo ao fee-for-service / Facturación Hospitalaria aplicada al servicio de parto: modelo alternativo al fee-for-service / Hospital billing for birthing services: an alternative model to fee-for-service

Resumo Objetivo Propor modelo alternativo ao faturamento hospitalar de pagamento por procedimento para pagamento por pacotes de serviço. Métodos Trata-se de uma pesquisa exploratório-descritiva, documental, baseada em dados secundários, com abordagem quantitativa, realizado em três etapas: I-levantamento de custos hospitalares; II-escolhas dos protocolos de atendimento; III-elaboração de pacotes de serviço. Para isso, foi analisado o comportamento dos custos hospitalares do serviço de parto de um hospital materno infantil público no período de 2014 a 2016. Também foram considerados protocolos para formar pacotes de serviços, com base nas indicações de parto do Ministério da Saúde e Conitec, nos indicadores QALY e de segurança do paciente. Resultados Considerando o estado de saúde da paciente, foi possível montar 3(três) pacotes de serviços, classificados como pacotes 1, 2 e 3, sendo a gestante de risco habitual classificada como pacote 1 com um custo médio de R$9.652,63; a gestante de alto risco, classificada como pacote 2 apresentou um custo médio de R$ 18.557,99; e a gestante de risco extremo, classificada como tipo 3 apresentou um custo médio de R$ 41.386,49. Conclusão Ao entrar em um hospital, a parturiente será classificada conforme o grau de risco apresentado. Com isso, tanto a paciente quanto os provedores de saúde saberiam o custo estimado do seu atendimento. Isso diminuiria a quantidade de procedimentos registrados pela assistência, permitindo dedicar mais tempo para a paciente, seguindo protocolos de atendimento padronizados. O caso pode ser replicado em qualquer instituição pública ou privada, levando-se em consideração os seus custos e os indicadores de qualidade da unidade.

Resumen Objetivo Proponer un modelo alternativo a la facturación hospitalaria por procedimientos de paquetes de servicios. Métodos Investigación exploratorio-descriptiva, documental, basada en datos secundarios, de abordaje cuantitativo, realizada en tres etapas: I-relevamiento de costos hospitalarios; II-elección de protocolos de atención; III-elaboración de paquetes de servicio. Se analizó el comportamiento del costo hospitalario del servicio de parto de un hospital Maternoinfantil público entre 2014 y 2016. También se consideraron protocolos para conformar paquetes de servicio según indicaciones de parto del Ministerio de Salud y el Conitec, en los indicadores QALY y de seguridad del paciente. Resultados Considerando el estado de salud del paciente, pudieron elaborarse 3 (tres) paquetes de servicios, clasificados como 1, 2 y 3, habiéndose considerado a la parturienta con riesgo normal como paquete 1 con costo promedio de R$9.652,63; la parturienta de alto riesgo fue clasificada como paquete 2, presentando costo promedio de R$18.557,99; la parturienta con riesgo extremo fue clasificada como paquete 3, presentando costo promedio de R$41.386,49. Conclusión En su admisión, la parturienta será clasificada según el grado de riesgo. Así, tanto la paciente como los proveedores de salud conocerán el costo estimado de su atención. Eso disminuiría la cantidad de procedimientos registrados en la atención, permitiendo dedicarle mayor tiempo a la paciente, siguiendo protocolos de atención estandarizados. El caso puede replicarse en cualquier institución pública o privada, considerando sus costos y los indicadores de calidad de la unidad.

Abstract Objective To propose an alternative model to hospital fee-for-service billing by using bundled service charges. Methods This was documentary, exploratory, descriptive research based on secondary data, using a quantitative approach, conducted in three stages: I - hospital cost survey; II - choice of caring protocols; III - development of bundled services. The hospital costs of the birthing service in a public maternity hospital were analyzed from 2014 to 2016. Protocols were also considered to create bundled services, based on the birth indications of the Ministry of Health and the National Commission for Incorporation of Technologies (Conitec), in the quality-adjusted life-year indicators (QALY and patient safety indicators. Results Considering the patient's state of health, three bundles were developed, classified as Bundle 1, 2 and 3. The normal risk pregnant woman was classified as Bundle 1, with an mean cost of R$9,652.63; the high-risk pregnant woman was classified as Bundle 2, presenting a mean cost of R$18,557.99; and, the extreme-risk pregnant woman was classified as Bundle 3, with a mean cost of R$41,386.49. Conclusion When hospitalized, the parturient is classified according to the level of risk present. Therefore, both the patient and the health providers can estimate the costs associated with specific levels of care. This strategy can reduce the amount of documentation, allowing more time for patient care, following standardized care protocols. The methodology can be replicated in any public or private institution, taking into account its costs, and the quality indicators for care.

Are Integrated Plan Providers Associated With Lower Premiums on the Health Insurance Marketplaces?

As the health insurance industry becomes more consolidated, hospitals and health systems have started to enter the insurance business. Insurers are also rapidly acquiring providers. Although these "vertically" integrated plan providers are small players in the insurance market, they are becoming more numerous. The health insurance marketplaces (HIMs) offer a unique setting to study integrated plan providers relative to other insurer types because the HIMs were designed to promote competition. In this descriptive study, the authors compared the premiums of the lowest priced silver plans of integrated plan providers with other insurer types on the 2015 and 2016 HIMs. Integrated plan providers were associated with modestly lower premiums relative to most other insurer types. This study provides early insights into premium competition on the HIMs. Examining integrated plan providers as a separate insurer type has important policy implications because they are a growing segment of the marketplaces and their pricing behavior may influence future premium trends.

Coping With Concentration.

Provider market power is a powerful driver of high health care costs in the United States. Despite decades of antitrust litigation and regulatory interventions, the problem has worsened and threatens to undermine the benefits of market-based policies. A critical but neglected challenge for all health care reform proposals relying on market competition to address costs is finding effective tools to address the extant market power of dominant hospitals, hospital systems, and many specialty physician practices. This article analyzes the principal market-oriented approaches that have been used in the past and proposed for the future. It argues that antitrust law has an important but constrained role to play and has proved to be especially inept in dealing with extant market power. It finds serious deficiencies in the conduct decrees imposed by some courts and in open-ended regulatory regimes such as those established by Certificate of Public Advantage laws. Although not without administrative complications, policies that target providers who possess market power by capping prices may be the most effective means to control costs and retain the benefits of a competitive delivery system.

Telemedicine and the sharing economy: the "Uber" for healthcare.

Telehealth platforms, which include both competitors and complements to traditional care delivery, will offer many benefits for both consumers and clinicians, and may promote increased specialization and competition in service delivery. Traditional medical services providers face a challenge similar to that faced by traditional taxicabs after Uber entered the marketplace: how to compete with a connection services platform that threatens to disrupt existing, regulated, and licensed service providers.

Temporal Analysis of Market Competition and Density in Renal Transplantation Volume and Outcome.

BACKGROUND: Kidney transplant centers are distributed unevenly throughout 58 donor service areas (DSAs) in the United States. Market competition and transplant center density may affect transplantation access and outcomes. We evaluated the role of spatial organization of transplant centers in conjunction with market competition in the conduct of kidney transplantation. METHODS: The Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients was queried for market characteristics associated with kidney transplantation between 2003 and 2012. Market competition was calculated using the Herfindahl Hirschman Index. Kidney transplant centers were geocoded to measure spatial organization by the average nearest neighbor (ANN) method. Kidney quality was assessed by kidney donor risk index. A hierarchical negative binomial mixed effects model tested the relationship between market characteristics and annual kidney transplants by DSA. RESULTS: About 152,071 kidney transplants were performed at 229 adult kidney transplant centers in 58 DSAs. Greater market competition was associated with kidney transplant center spatial clustering (P < 0.001). In multivariable analysis, more kidney transplant centers (incidence rate ratio [IRR], 1.04; P = 0.005), 100 more new listings (IRR, 1.02; P = 0.003), 100 more deceased donors (IRR, 1.23; P < 0.001), 100 more new dialysis registrants (IRR, 1.01; P < 0.001), and higher kidney donor risk index (IRR, 1.98; P < 0.001) were associated with increased kidney transplants. CONCLUSIONS: After controlling for market characteristics, larger numbers of kidney transplant centers were associated with more kidney transplants and increased utilization of deceased donor kidneys. This underlines the importance of understanding geography as well as competition in improving access to kidney transplantation.

To Enroll or Not to Enroll? Why Many Americans Have Gained Insurance Under the Affordable Care Act While Others Have Not. Findings from the Commonwealth Fund Affordable Care Act Tracking Survey, March-May 2015.

According to the most recent Commonwealth Fund Affordable Care Act Tracking Survey, March-May 2015, an estimated 25 million adults remain uninsured. To achieve the Affordable Care Act's goal of near-universal coverage, policymakers must understand why some people are enrolling in the law's marketplace plans or in Medicaid coverage and why others are not. This analysis of the survey finds that affordability--whether real or perceived--is playing a significant role in adults' choice of marketplace plans and the decision whether to enroll at all. People who have gained coverage report significantly more positive experiences shopping for health plans than do those who did not enroll. Getting personal assistance--from telephone hotlines, navigators, and insurance brokers, among other sources--appears to make a critical difference in whether people gain health insurance

Opportunities and limitations of patient choice: the case of the Russian Federation.

While many countries have increased the opportunities for patient choice of provider, there is debate to what extent this has had positive effects on efficiency and quality of healthcare provision. First, some conditions should be met to exercise such choice, of which the most important is the provision of reliable data on providers' performance to both patients and physicians as their agents, as well as increasing primary health care (PHC) providers' involvement in realization of patient choice. Second, expanding patient choice does not always lead to efficient allocation of resources in a healthcare system. This article explores these controversial developments by using empirical evidence from the Russian Federation. It shows that choice indeed has value for patients, but there are many areas of inefficient choice, which leads to misallocation of healthcare recourses. Thus, health policy in this area should be designed to ensure a reasonable balance between objectives of expanding choice and promoting more efficient organization of healthcare provision. Political rhetoric about unlimited patient choice may be useless and even risky unless supported by well-balanced programmes of supporting and managing choice.

Solving the value equation in health care.

In seeking to foster greater value in health care, Michael Porter and colleagues have advanced ideas for a very different delivery and payment system.

The experience of Massachusetts shows that consumers will need help in navigating insurance exchanges.

In 2022 twenty-five million people are expected to purchase health insurance through exchanges to be established under the Affordable Care Act. Understanding how people seek information and make decisions about the insurance plans that are available to them may improve their ability to select a plan and their satisfaction with it. We conducted a survey in 2010 of enrollees in one plan offered through Massachusetts's unsubsidized health insurance exchange to analyze how a sample of consumers selected their plans. More than 40 percent found plan information difficult to understand. Approximately one-third of respondents had help selecting plans-most commonly from friends or family members. However, one-fifth of respondents wished they had had help narrowing plan choices; these enrollees were more likely to report negative experiences related to plan understanding, satisfaction with affordability and coverage, and unexpected costs. Some may have been eligible for subsidized plans. Exchanges may need to provide more resources and decision-support tools to improve consumers' experiences in selecting a health plan.

Choosing the 'best' plan in a health insurance exchange: actuarial value tells only part of the story.

In the health insurance exchanges that will come online in 2014, consumers will be able to compare health plans with respect to actuarial value, or the percentage of health care costs that a plan would pay for a standard population. This analysis illustrates the out-of-pocket costs that might result from plans with various plan designs and actuarial values. We find that average out-of-pocket expense declines as actuarial values rise, but two plans with similar actuarial values can produce very different outcomes for a given person. The overall affordability of a plan also will be influenced by age rating, income-related premium subsidies, and out-of-pocket subsidies. Actuarial value is a useful starting point for selecting a plan, but it does not pinpoint which plan will produce the best overall value for a particular person.

Private health insurance: a role model for European health systems.

European health care systems will face major challenges in the near future. Demographic change and technological progress induce rising costs. In order to deal with these developments and to preserve the current level of health care provision, health care systems need to be highly efficient. Yet existing health care systems show a lot of inefficiencies that result in waste of scarce resources. Therefore, improvements in performance are necessary. In this article, we argue that a change in financing health care accompanied by the liberalisation of the market for health care service providers offers a promising solution. We develop a market-based model for financing health care and show how it can be put into practice without generating additional costs for society while meeting social equity criteria.

The structure of risk adjustment for private plans in Medicare.

Medicare bases its risk adjustment method for Medicare Advantage plan payment on the relative costs of treating various diagnoses in traditional Medicare. However, there are many reasons to doubt that the relative cost of treating different diagnoses is similar between Medicare Advantage plans and traditional Medicare, including the varying applicability of care management methods to different diagnoses and the varying degrees of market power among suppliers of services to plans. We use internal cost data from a large health plan to compare its cost of treating various diagnoses with Medicare's reimbursement. We find substantial variability across diagnoses, implying that the current risk adjustment system creates incentives for Medicare Advantage plans to favor beneficiaries with certain diagnoses, but find no consistent relationship between the costliness of the diagnosis and the difference between reimbursement and cost.

Choice in public health insurance: evidence from West Virginia medicaid redesign.

This paper examines the factors that affect plan choice in a public health insurance program. West Virginia recently redesigned its state Medicaid program, offering members a choice between two plans--a basic plan and an enhanced plan. The latter plan includes more benefits, but requires additional agreements intended to lead patients to adopt healthier lifestyles. We use administrative claims records and survey data to examine plan choice. Our results yield convincing evidence that members with higher health care utilization patterns are more likely to enroll in the enhanced plan, but other factors such as education are also important.

Effects of health savings account-eligible plans on utilization and expenditures.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the impact of a health savings account (HSA)-eligible plan on utilization and expenditures in an employer-sponsored Midwestern health plan which offered a traditional plan from 2003 through 2004 that was fully replaced by an HSA-eligible plan in 2005 and 2006. STUDY DESIGN: Retrospective pre-post design with a control group. METHODS: Medical and pharmacy claims of plan members younger than 65 years who were continuously enrolled throughout the 4-year study period were used to evaluate the impact of switching to the HSA-eligible plan. Expenditure and utilization measures were compared with those for a control group covered by employers in the same industry and geographic location, while controlling for patient characteristics. RESULTS: The HSA-eligible plan was associated with significantly lower total expenditures (-17.4%), fewer and less costly office visits (-13.6% and -20.3%, respectively), fewer emergency department (ED) visits (-20.1%), lower pharmacy expenditures (-29.2%), lower expenses per drug (-27.9%), a reduced likelihood of mammograms (odds ratio [OR] = 0.55, P <.05) and Papanicolaou tests (OR = 0.66, P <.05), and a borderline significant reduction in routine physical exams (OR = 0.76, P <.10). The HSA-eligible plan also was associated with increased outpatient facility expenditures (5.1%, P <.05). CONCLUSION: Employer-sponsored HSA-eligible plans appear to be associated with lower healthcare expenditures and/or utilization, particularly for office visits, ED visits, and pharmacy. However, they also may discourage preventive care, leading to increased long-term medical costs. Employers offering HSA-eligible plans should ensure that there are no financial barriers for preventive services.