Health for life

Too-big-to-fail JP Morgan is losing billions of dollars. Greece is getting ready to prop up their banks with devalued drachmas. Facebook is getting ready to monetize your personal data. Dozens of health care organizations are jumping into shared financial risk arrangements. The good news is that while nothing is standing between utter disaster and the U.S. stock markets, the Euro or your privacy, physicians have this handy Care Continuum Alliance resource titled "Population Health Management: A Road Map for Primary Care Practices."

Thanks to this well written, extensively erenced and evidence-based report, primary care leaders can learn how to align population health management (PHM) with their primary care physician network to reduce risk, maximize savings, achieve efficiencies and minimize any disruption of their physicians work flows.  The rest of the world may be going to hell in a hand basket, but docs will be far better positioned to bend the cost curve and be rewarded with that fat end-of-year reconciliation check.

The report discusses:

1) how health risk assessments (HRAs) can be used to gauge the risk of those patients you dont know about;

2) the role of predictive modeling in stratifying the risk of your attributed population;

3) how to recruit and engage patients at greatest risk

4) how clinical guidelines can be best applied at the point of care

5) why care managers can assume responsibility for identifying and recruiting at risk patients and advocating on behalf of the guidelines.

How can the Disease Management Care Blog be so confident that this report is all that and more?  It helped write it.

And the best part is that the document download is for free.

The CDC just released their State Map for Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity:



Stats:

• More than one-third of US adults (35.7%) are obese.
• Obesity-related conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer.
• The medical costs paid by third-party payers for people who are obese were $1,429 higher than those of normal weight.
• Non-Hispanic blacks have the highest age-adjusted rates of obesity (49.5%) compared with Mexican Americans (40.4%), all Hispanics (39.1%) and non-Hispanic whites (34.3%)
• No state had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%.
• The South had the highest prevalence of obesity (29.5%), followed by the Midwest (29.0%), the Northeast (25.3%) and the West (24.3%).

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