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Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | December 21, 2016
From the December 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
New ideas
Last year, the American Hospital Association (AHA) established a task force with the goal of ensuring access to health care in vulnerable rural and urban communities by exploring alternative models. The task force recently released several strategies to help both types of hospitals address challenges. The strategies include working with other organizations in the community to address a lack of affordable housing and food insecurity; using a global budget payment program, in which hospitals receive a fixed amount for all the costs associated with caring for a patient, with incentives to communities to contain health care costs and improve the quality of care; and providing only emergency and primary care services and reducing or eliminating inpatient services.
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The strategies do have some precedent, explains Priya Bathija, senior director of health policy at the AHA. Maryland, for example, has been testing out the global budget payment program, a model that needs an entire region or state on board. Several facilities have also begun focusing on emergency and primary care services, such as the Carolinas HealthCare System Anson in Wadesboro, N.C., whose success has been reported on in HealthCare Business News. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution that’s going to help all these communities,” Bathija says. “Some communities may be able to use one of these options. Some can use more than one.”
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