Health systems rely on commercial prediction algorithms to identify and help patients with complex health needs. We show that a widely used algorithm, typical of this industry-wide approach and affecting millions of patients, exhibits significant racial bias: At a given risk score, Black patients are considerably sicker than White patients, as evidenced by signs of uncontrolled illnesses. Remedying this disparity would increase the percentage of Black patients receiving additional help from 17.7 to 46.5%. The bias arises because the algorithm predicts health care costs rather than illness, but unequal access to care means that we spend less money caring for Black patients than for White patients. Thus, despite health care cost appearing to be an effective proxy for health by some measures of predictive accuracy, large racial biases arise. We suggest that the choice of convenient, seemingly effective proxies for ground truth can be an important source of algorithmic bias in many contexts.

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Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations

Medication adherence usually refers to whether patients take their medications as prescribed (eg, twice daily), as well as whether they continue to take a prescribed medication. Medication nonadherence is a growing concern to clinicians, healthcare systems, and other stakeholders (eg, payers) because of mounting evidence that it is prevalent and associated with adverse outcomes and higher costs of care. To date, measurement of patient medication adherence and use of interventions to improve adherence are rare in routine clinical practice. The goals of the present report are to address (1) different methods of measuring adherence, (2) the prevalence of medication nonadherence, (3) the association between nonadherence and outcomes, (4) the reasons for nonadherence, and finally, (5) interventions to improve medication adherence.

Medication Adherence: Its Importance in Cardiovascular Outcomes

America's health care system has become too complex and costly to continue business as usual. Best Care at Lower Cost explains that inefficiencies, an overwhelming amount of data, and other economic and quality barriers hinder progress in improving health and threaten the nation's economic stability and global competitiveness. According to this report, the knowledge and tools exist to put the health system on the right course to achieve continuous improvement and better quality care at a lower cost.The costs of the system's current inefficiency underscore the urgent need for a systemwide transformation. About 30 percent of health spending in 2009--roughly $750 billion--was wasted on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems. Moreover, inefficiencies cause needless suffering. By one estimate, roughly 75,000 deaths might have been averted in 2005 if every state had delivered care at the quality level of the best performing state. This report states that the way health care providers currently train, practice, and learn new information cannot keep pace with the flood of research discoveries and technological advances.About 75 million Americans have more than one chronic condition, requiring coordination among multiple specialists and therapies, which can increase the potential for miscommunication, misdiagnosis, potentially conflicting interventions, and dangerous drug interactions. Best Care at Lower Cost emphasizes that a better use of data is a critical element of a continuously improving health system, such as mobile technologies and electronic health records that offer significant potential to capture and share health data better. In order for this to occur, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, IT developers, and standard-setting organizations should ensure that these systems are robust and interoperable. Clinicians and care organizations should fully adopt these technologies, and patients should be encouraged to use tools, such as personal health information portals, to actively engage in their care.This book is a call to action that will guide health care providers; administrators; caregivers; policy makers; health professionals; federal, state, and local government agencies; private and public health organizations; and educational institutions.

Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America

In the United States, approximately 14 million people have had cancer and more than 1.6 million new cases are diagnosed each year. However, more than a decade after the Institute of Medicine (IOM) first studied the quality of cancer care, the barriers to achieving excellent care for all cancer patients remain daunting. Care often is not patient-centered, many patients do not receive palliative care to manage their symptoms and side effects from treatment, and decisions about care often are not based on the latest scientific evidence. The cost of cancer care also is rising faster than many sectors of medicine--having increased to $125 billion in 2010 from $72 billion in 2004--and is projected to reach $173 billion by 2020. Rising costs are making cancer care less affordable for patients and their families and are creating disparities in patients' access to high-quality cancer care. There also are growing shortages of health professionals skilled in providing cancer care, and the number of adults age 65 and older--the group most susceptible to cancer--is expected to double by 2030, contributing to a 45 percent increase in the number of people developing cancer. The current care delivery system is poorly prepared to address the care needs of this population, which are complex due to altered physiology, functional and cognitive impairment, multiple coexisting diseases, increased side effects from treatment, and greater need for social support. Delivering High-Quality Cancer Care: Charting a New Course for a System in Crisis presents a conceptual framework for improving the quality of cancer care. This study proposes improvements to six interconnected components of care: (1) engaged patients; (2) an adequately staffed, trained, and coordinated workforce; (3) evidence-based care; (4) learning health care information technology (IT); (5) translation of evidence into clinical practice, quality measurement and performance improvement; and (6) accessible and affordable care. This report recommends changes across the board in these areas to improve the quality of care. Delivering High-Quality Cancer Care: Charting a New Course for a System in Crisis provides information for cancer care teams, patients and their families, researchers, quality metrics developers, and payers, as well as HHS, other federal agencies, and industry to reevaluate their current roles and responsibilities in cancer care and work together to develop a higher quality care delivery system. By working toward this shared goal, the cancer care community can improve the quality of life and outcomes for people facing a cancer diagnosis.

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Delivering High-Quality Cancer Care: Charting a New Course for a System in Crisis

ContextPrescription drugs are instrumental to managing and preventing chronic disease. Recent changes in US prescription drug cost sharing could affect access to them.ObjectiveTo synthesize published evidence on the associations among cost-sharing features of prescription drug benefits and use of prescription drugs, use of nonpharmaceutical services, and health outcomes.Data SourcesWe searched PubMed for studies published in English between 1985 and 2006.Study Selection and Data ExtractionAmong 923 articles found in the search, we identified 132 articles examining the associations between prescription drug plan cost-containment measures, including co-payments, tiering, or coinsurance (n = 65), pharmacy benefit caps or monthly prescription limits (n = 11), formulary restrictions (n = 41), and reference pricing (n = 16), and salient outcomes, including pharmacy utilization and spending, medical care utilization and spending, and health outcomes.ResultsIncreased cost sharing is associated with lower rates of drug treatment, worse adherence among existing users, and more frequent discontinuation of therapy. For each 10% increase in cost sharing, prescription drug spending decreases by 2% to 6%, depending on class of drug and condition of the patient. The reduction in use associated with a benefit cap, which limits either the coverage amount or the number of covered prescriptions, is consistent with other cost-sharing features. For some chronic conditions, higher cost sharing is associated with increased use of medical services, at least for patients with congestive heart failure, lipid disorders, diabetes, and schizophrenia. While low-income groups may be more sensitive to increased cost sharing, there is little evidence to support this contention.ConclusionsPharmacy benefit design represents an important public health tool for improving patient treatment and adherence. While increased cost sharing is highly correlated with reductions in pharmacy use, the long-term consequences of benefit changes on health are still uncertain.

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Prescription drug cost sharing: associations with medication and medical utilization and spending and health.

Background Little information exists about the consequences of limits on prescription-drug benefits for Medicare beneficiaries. Methods We compared the clinical and economic outcomes in 2003 among 157,275 Medicare+Choice beneficiaries whose annual drug benefits were capped at $1,000 and 41,904 beneficiaries whose drug benefits were unlimited because of employer supplements. Results After adjusting for individual characteristics, we found that subjects whose benefits were capped had pharmacy costs for drugs applicable to the cap that were lower by 31 percent than subjects whose benefits were not capped (95 percent confidence interval, 29 to 33 percent) but had total medical costs that were only 1 percent lower (95 percent confidence interval, −4 to 6 percent). Subjects whose benefits were capped had higher relative rates of visits to the emergency department (relative rate, 1.09 [95 percent confidence interval, 1.04 to 1.14]), nonelective hospitalizations (relative rate, 1.13 [1.05 to 1.21]), and death (re...

Unintended Consequences of Caps on Medicare Drug Benefits

Background:Differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate resource use represents a critical challenge in health services research. The New York University Emergency Department (NYU ED) visit severity algorithm attempts to classify visits to the ED based on diagnosis, but it has not been form

Validation of an algorithm for categorizing the severity of hospital emergency department visits.

The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, enacted in 2003, substantially reduced payment rates for chemotherapy drugs administered on an outpatient basis starting in January 2005. We assessed how these reductions affected the likelihood and setting of chemotherapy treatment for Medicare beneficiaries with newly diagnosed lung cancer, as well as the types of agents they received. Contrary to concerns about access, we found that the changes actually increased the likelihood that lung cancer patients received chemotherapy. The type of chemotherapy agents administered also changed. Physicians switched from dispensing the drugs that experienced the largest cuts in profitability, carboplatin and paclitaxel, to other high-margin drugs, like docetaxel. We do not know what the effect was on cancer patients, but these changes may have offset some of the savings projected from passage of the legislation. The ultimate message is that payment reforms have real consequences and should be undertaken with caution.

How Medicare’s Payment Cuts For Cancer Chemotherapy Drugs Changed Patterns Of Treatment

Context Medicare Part D drug benefits include substantial cost sharing. Objective To determine beneficiaries' knowledge of benefits and cost responses. Design, Setting, and Participants Telephone interviews were conducted in 2007 in a stratified random sample of community-dwelling Kaiser Permanente-Northern California Medicare Advantage beneficiaries aged 65 years or older, with a gap in coverage if they exceeded $2250 in drug costs (N = 1040; 74.9% response rate). Half were selected to have reached the gap in 2006. In the source population of Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug plan beneficiaries, 8% entered the coverage gap in 2006. Models were adjusted for individual characteristics and weighted for sampling proportions. Main Outcome Measures Knowledge of cost sharing including awareness of the coverage gap, gap start and end amounts, and drug cost sharing before, during, and after the gap. Cost-related responses including cost-coping behaviors (eg, switching to lower-cost medications), reduced adherence (eg, not refilling prescriptions), and financial burden (eg, going without necessities). Results An estimated 40% (95% confidence interval [CI], 35%-45%) of beneficiaries were aware that their drug plan in 2006 included a coverage gap; knowledge of the gap was greater among individuals who reached the gap during the year. Approximately 36% (95% CI, 32%-41%) of beneficiaries reported at least 1 of the following responses to drug costs: cost-coping behavior (26%), reduced adherence (15%), or experiencing financial burden (7%). In multivariate analyses, beneficiaries with lower household income more frequently reported cost responses (difference of 14.5 percentage points for Conclusions Beneficiaries in this Medicare Advantage plan have limited knowledge of Part D cost sharing and often report behavioral responses to drug costs. Limited knowledge is associated with fewer reports of cost responses overall, but more reports of financial burden.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/articlepdf/181814/joc80031_1929_1936.pdf

Medicare beneficiaries' knowledge of Part D prescription drug program benefits and responses to drug costs.

Within Medicare, the Medicare Advantage program has historically attracted better risks—healthier, lower-cost patients—than has traditional Medicare. The disproportionate enrollment of lower-cost patients and avoidance of higher-cost ones during the 1990s—known as favorable selection—resulted in Medicare’s spending more per beneficiary who enrolled in Medicare Advantage than if the enrollee had remained in traditional Medicare. We looked at two measures that can indicate whether favorable selection is taking place—predicted spending on beneficiaries and mortality—and studied whether policies that Medicare implemented in the past decade succeeded in reducing favorable selection in Medicare Advantage. We found that these policies—an improved risk adjustment formula and a prohibition on monthly disenrollment by beneficiaries—largely succeeded. Differences in predicted spending between those switching from traditional Medicare to Medicare Advantage relative to those who remained in traditional Medicare marked...

Mary Price

Papers

Unintended Consequences of Caps on Medicare Drug Benefits

Validation of an algorithm for categorizing the severity of hospital emergency department visits.

How Medicare’s Payment Cuts For Cancer Chemotherapy Drugs Changed Patterns Of Treatment

Medicare beneficiaries' knowledge of Part D prescription drug program benefits and responses to drug costs.

Steps To Reduce Favorable Risk Selection In Medicare Advantage Largely Succeeded, Boding Well For Health Insurance Exchanges