Sunday, January 20, 2008

Report Recommends Improvements

The Draft Report from the Health Care Transformation Task Force presents a vision for transforming the healthcare system in Minnesota. The draft report was submitted January 2008 to Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and to the Minnesota State Legislative.

The recommendations addressing ways to reform the payment system include:

· Empowering individuals with information to give them choices and responsibility, and the need to improve the coordination and management of care especially for people with chronic diseases
· Increasing transparency and provider competition data on price and quality
· Sustaining the critical mass needed to create powerful incentives for providers to devote the necessary investment needed to fundamentally design the ways they provide healthcare.

Payment reform would move ahead in three stages. Level 1 would have payments tied to quality of care, level 2 would establish explicit care management payments to providers that have the infrastructure and systems to function as an effective medical or healthcare home capable of coordinating care, and level 3 would establish a system of accountability for the total cost of care.

Further suggestions would enable provider groups and care systems to compete for patients by submitting bids on the total cost of care for a given population. Patients would choose provider groups and care systems based on cost and quality, and payments to providers would be risk adjusted based on the health of the population they manage.

For more information, go to the Minnesota Health Care Transformation Task Force at http://www.healthstate.mn.us/.