Washington Post: 'New Health-Care Law Might Make Your Doctor More Informed, Efficient, Responsive'
...one thing is clear: There are a lot of unhappy people practicing medicine right now....If the new types of practice envisioned by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act take hold, much of that could change for the better.
The new health care law aims to emphasize primary care--to improve patient health and control costs over the long-term:
Key to the new law's goals is primary care. Through many routes, the law provides a total of $26.4 billion over 10 years to support this broad field of medicine, which, dozens of studies have shown, improves health and controls costs....the law has several provisions designed to make primary care more attractive.
It increases Medicare reimbursement for "evaluation and management" services, the government's name for examining and talking to the patient. It provides about $350 million in additional support for training programs in primary care. It provides loan-forgiveness incentives to medical school graduates who practice primary care in under-served areas. There are also incentives for the training of nurse practitioners and physician assistants, two professions likely to have growing roles in primary care.
Secondly, it will provide better coordination among private practitioners through payment "bundling" and integrating practitioners into "accountable care organizations":
The law has numerous provisions, many laid out only in general terms, for testing alternatives to the fee-for-service model that Medicare and Medicaid operate under now. They include "bundled" payments for hospital and immediate post-hospital care, which would provide an incentive to minimize readmissions, and the banding together of doctors, hospitals, clinics, imaging centers, diagnostic labs, etc., into "accountable care organizations" that would get to share in any savings accruing to the Medicare program.
Lastly, it will make medical care more patient centered, by focusing on quality reporting measures, "comparative effectiveness research," and the creation of "patient decision aids":
Doctors already have incentives to report quality-related measures to Medicare. The new law will penalize doctors who don't make such reports, starting in 2015. In the future, physicians participating in the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative will receive reports about how their performance compares to others'.There is also money for the creation and dissemination of "patient decision aids" -- handouts, videos, computer programs, etc. -- that will help patients understand their treatment options. That is part of the law's general intent to make medical care more patient-centered.
... the law establishes a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to underwrite and direct "comparative-effectiveness research" seeking to determine the best and most economical treatment for common diseases.