What is the IHS?

What is the Indian Health Service (IHS)?  The video below gives a nice primer on the history of IHS. The IHS provides health care to American Indians and Alaska Natives at 33 hospitals, 59 health centers and 50 health centers.   You can find the current locations of IHS facilities HERE.  Whereas the IHS annual budget…

NCCN Evidence Blocks

NCCN recently released a new approach to measure the value of cancer medicines. The approach–known as Evidence Blocks–evaluates medications on 5 dimensions: Efficacy of regimens, Safety of regimens, Quality and quantity of evidence for regimens, Consistency of evidence for regimens, and Affordability of regimens. Each criteria is ranked on a 1 to 5 block scale.…

The 340B Program: An Overview

What is the 340B program?  A May 2015 MedPAC report has a nice summary: The 340B Drug Pricing Program allows certain hospitals and other health care providers (“covered entities”) to obtain discounted prices on “covered outpatient drugs” (prescription drugs and biologics other than vaccines) from drug manufacturers. Manufacturers must offer 340B discounts to covered entities…

How to measure quality

Medicare’s Shared Savings Program (MSSP) contracts with accountable care organizations (ACOs) and provides financial rewards to ACOs that provide high-quality, low-cost care.  One question is whether or not the MSSP program does a good job of defining quality. A paper by Valuck and co-authors examines what constitutes high-quality of care for 20 high-cost and highly prevalent…