Eating disorders often start at a younger age, but they don’t solely affect this population. Recognizing this, virtual eating disorder support company Equip announced Tuesday that it is now treating adults as well as adolescents. The company also announced an investment from General Catalyst, which helped expand its platform to adults. The amount was not disclosed.
“There is a very pervasive, really dense stereotype that eating disorders only affect 15- to 25-year-old thin, White girls,” said Dr. Erin Parks, chief clinical officer and co-founder of Equip, in an interview. “That is true, it does affect them. But it is not only them.”
She added that because so few people have access to treatment, many older adults have had their eating disorder for a very long time and need support.
San Diego-based Equip, which was founded in 2019, previously focused on those ages 6 to 24. The startup is now expanding to serve people of all ages. The virtual company operates in all 50 states and is in-network with several insurance companies, including Aetna, Elevance, Optum, Cigna and UnitedHealthcare. It connects patients with a care team that includes a therapist, dietitian, physician and peer and family mentor.
Different ages require different kinds of treatment, according to Parks. With its younger patients, the company uses family-based treatment, in which the family is brought in to help care for the patient. For adults, the company is using a method called enhanced cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a highly individualized treatment that addresses thoughts, feelings and behaviors affecting the patient’s eating disorder.
Parks said that when it comes to adults, individual treatment is often the best way to go because they may not have a support group. Sometimes when adults have been sick for a long time, they’ve “pushed away” a lot of their family and peers, or they may be too busy with work to build that support group.
There are other virtual solutions for eating disorders as well, including Arise and Within. Arise offers coaching with a care advocate who has lived experience with an eating disorder, therapy, nutrition counseling, group support and psychiatry. Within provides access to a care team that includes dietitians, therapists, nurses and peers.
The expansion to adults was powered by a recent investment by General Catalyst. In total, Equip has raised more than $75 million. With the funding, the company brought on a new president, Nikia Bergan. It also updated its technology and trained its providers in treating adults. In addition, it’s planning to use the funding to gain more Medicaid contracts, Parks said.
Equip considers itself an alternative to brick-and-mortar eating disorder treatments, which often require patients to stay at the treatment facility for a certain period. Parks said the benefit of a virtual program is that patients can be treated as they live their normal lives.
“[If you take] someone out of their life and give them a bunch of skills, then all of the sudden they plop back into their life and have all these triggers that they aren’t equipped to deal with,” Parks argued. “One of the great things about getting treatment while still being able to go to school, still being able to go to your job, still being able to parent your kids, is that you get to work with your providers on your real-life triggers as they come up.”
Parks is likely looking to replicate the positive results it claims to have achieved in the adolescent population in this new, adult population. In its annual outcomes report published earlier this year, the company cited that 81% of its adolescent patients reached or maintained their target weight within one year.
Photo credit: Bohdan Skrypnyk, Getty Images
The commercial market has been slower to adopt value-based care than the public market, but there are ways to move the process along successfully, executives said Monday.
During a panel at the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Summit 2023 held in Chicago, healthcare leaders discussed the challenges and opportunities in advancing value-based care in commercial health plans. The panelists were Mark Hansberry, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of HealthPartners; Ellen Kelsay, president and CEO of Business Group on Health; and Tiffany Albert, senior vice president of health plan business at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.
Bloomington, Minnesota-based HealthPartners, which is an integrated healthcare organization serving more than 1.8 million members, has had some success with value-based care in the commercial space, Hansberry claimed. He shared five rules for scaling value-based care in the commercial market:
1. Payers and providers in a value-based arrangement need to have a shared understanding of what value is for patients, Hansberry said.
“You have to have a universal definition of what value means so that when clinicians look at you as a payer … they need to acknowledge that what you’re saying a clinical outcome is is actually a good clinical outcome, a good measure of performance,” he stated.
2. It’s important to ensure that the providers in the value-based arrangement are able to and willing to take the risk associated with value-based care.
“Most care systems weren’t built to actually manage risk,” Hansberry said. “That wasn’t their job. Their job was to take care of sick people. Now we’re asking them to do something else. How do you actually support those individuals on that journey?”
3. Payers need to support providers engaging in value-based care with “real-time, actionable data and consultation,” Hansberry said.
“It’s not just a data dump or a big Excel file that you pass over and you say good luck with it,” he stated. “Because, by the way, if they perform well in those value-based contracts, you do too as a payer. You want them to perform well. So you want to provide them with good, insightful, actionable data that’s risk-adjusted, that is connected to their practice — not just an amorphous health system — but to their practice so they can take action on those insights. But then you also want to supplement that with that consultation along the way.”
4. The incentives in the value-based contract must be aligned to “enable that [provider] to reap the benefits of the value that they’re creating for those members,” according to Hansberry.
5. Ultimately, a value-based contract comes down to trust between all the parties. But Hansberry noted that this is easier for HealthPartners as an integrated health system.
“We’re fortunate because we’re both a health plan and a care system,” he said.
He added that success in value-based care doesn’t happen overnight, which is partially why it’s difficult to scale.
“It takes time to build trust,” Hansberry stated.
Photo: atibodyphoto, Getty Images
MINNEAPOLIS — A pioneer in the Twin Cities craft brewing world is closing its doors.
For more than 10 years, Dangerous Man Brewing has been a craft brewing staple in northeast Minneapolis.
But on Friday, an announcement on social media: They’re shutting down their taproom.
“Quite an emotional time for us,” said Rob Miller, Dangerous Man’s head brewer and co-owner.
Miller owns Dangerous Man alongside Sarah Bonvallet.
“I think we were like the 26th brewery in the state that opened,” said Miller.
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According to Miller, they rented their space at Northeast 13th Avenue and Northeast 2nd Street, and that the landlord put the building up for sale a couple years ago.
The building had become increasingly expensive and out of their price range, leaving someone else to buy the building.
“It’s been fricking really amazing just to see that growth, be a part of that growth,” said Miller.
He said the taproom took a hit post-COVID. They just weren’t seeing the sales they once did.
WCCO
“We really didn’t want the business to just die a slow death,” he said.
So the couple opened a production facility in Maple Lake, where they’ve lived on a farm for six years. They now sell their product outside the taproom, hoping to offset the losses and keep their brand alive.
“It was either like we need to close the taproom down and be done and just do something completely different, or we need to start a different part of our business, add to the business, diversify our income,” he said.
Future plans are still to be determined.
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“We’re going to take some time to just kind of reevaluate. There’s a lot of ideas we have, having an event space on our farm, with music and beer and food, and a potential tap room maybe down the road is not out of the question,” he said.
Future plans with the building will be announced Monday.
Dangerous Man is definitely not done, said Miller. Their beer will still be available on liquor store shelves.
WCCO asked about what the closure means for Dangerous Man employees. The owners said they are not commenting on staffing and layoffs.
A joint venture between Greco, a Minneapolis real estate developer, and Eagle Ridge Partners, a Minneapolis development, acquisition and asset management firm, has secured $69 million in equity and construction financing for a mid-rise, luxury housing development in Eden Prairie, Minn.
JLL Capital Markets arranged $47 million in construction financing through MidWestOne Bank and Alerus Financial. The JLL Capital Markets team also secured nearly $22 million in joint venture equity from Amstar Group, a Denver-based real estate investment manager.
The JLL Capital Markets advisory team represented the sponsors and was led by Josh Talberg, Scott Loving, Matthew Schoenfeldt, Colin Ryan, Dan Linnell and Max Gunderson.
“The project will be a significant development for the city of Eden Prairie, and we are thankful to have a part in advancing it,” said Talberg in a statement. “The execution of Eagle Ridge and Greco, from concept to closing, has been remarkably impressive.”
Golden Triangle Station, a mid-rise, multi-housing development, has been in the works since 2019, when Eagle Ridge Partners bought 40 acres of land in Eden Prairie for $28.6 million. The affluent southwest suburb outside Minneapolis is located the famous “Golden Triangle Innovation Hub,” a central business district that boasts 600 companies and more than 20,000 jobs.
Located at 6901 Flying Cloud Drive, Golden Triangle Station is expected to add much-needed housing capacity to a growing area, one that has been plagued in recent years by a lack of available land contributing to high-barriers to entry for developers with multifamily projects.
“The Twin Cities markets, particularly sought-after suburban areas like Eden Prairie, consistently experience robust interest and demand from investors and lenders for premium assets,” said Talberg. “This project showcases this continuing trend and signals a promising outlook for both the region and the high-growth submarket.”
Golden Triangle Station is expected to feature 237 luxury units of one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments. Using Eden Prairie’s exclusionary zoning statutes, between 25 percent of the apartments will be rented at 50 percent to 80 percent of the area median income, allowing the project to capitalize on a Tax Increment Financing Structure it received from the Eden Prairie City Council. The buildings will also include roughly 315 underground parking spaces, an outdoor pool, a spa, theater room, club room and pickleball courts.
Located near the Golden Triangle LRT Train Line, and the future Green Line station—currently under development— Golden Triangle Station is positioned to attract workers looking for easy access into Minneapolis-St.Paul, a metropolitan area that carries a low-level of unemployment at only 3.3 percent, and features the headquarters of companies like target, Xcel Energy, General Mills, and U.S. Bank.
Founded in 2002, Greco has a portfolio of more than 5,000 housing units and 350,000 square feet of commercial real estate space.
Eagle Ridge Partners has owned and developed more than $1 billion worth of commercial real estate over the last 25 years. The firm’s commercial real estate portfolio in Minneapolis alone comprises more than 3 million square feet of space across multiple asset classes.
Brian Pascus can be reached at bpascus@commercialobserver.com
A new report shows high demand for affordable housing in New Haven as more young people move into the city — a demand the report says could be met by making changes to the city’s zoning ordinances.
The ‘Breaking Ground’ document, released by Elm City Communities, the housing authority for New Haven, details the current state of the city’s housing market and proposes solutions to the existing problems.
“New Haven’s housing crisis is severe and New Haven’s housing crisis is wide ranging,” said Karen Dubois-Walton, president of Elm City Communities, New Haven’s housing authority. “We heard very clearly the pain it causes is immediate and dire and it requires urgency of action.”
Elm City Communities serves over 14,000 individuals and more than 6,000 families find affordable housing through initiatives of public housing, housing choice vouchers, and low-income housing tax credits.
Will Viederman, housing policy manager at Elm City Communities and the primary author of the report, said between 2010 and 2019 the city became more affordable to live in as rent burden rates dropped. The rent burden rate is a measure of the number of households that pay more than 30% of their income toward housing costs.
However, this progress was stalled during the pandemic as rent prices began to increase faster than wages and more young people, ages 18 to 34, began looking for homes in the city, dropping vacancy rates to below 3% and spiking rent prices, he said.
“The city’s economy is growing, people are making more money. But, when there’s not enough vacancy, that extra income gets swallowed up in housing costs to keep rent growth below income growth,” he said. “The city needs vacant homes, and to do that as the city is growing, we need to build new homes.”
New Haven has approved less than 5,000 homes to be built in the period between 2010 and 2019, according to the report. Viederman however, estimates that the city needs to construct 8,400 new homes by 2030 in order to solve the current problems.
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Viederman’s report proposed several steps the city could take to bring about the needed change. These include: eliminating parking requirements; shrinking the citywide lot size requirements to a minimum of 1,400 square feet; and changing zoning codes to allow for more housing developments in exclusionary neighborhoods.
However, Viederman’s ideas may face challenges. Changes to zoning laws have historically been a contentious issue both statewide and locally. During the last legislative session, statewide changes to zoning law failed to pass in the legislature.
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Opponents have said that statewide zoning reform proposals would impose a one-size-fits all solution that wouldn’t work for every town and would dilute local control.
But Dubois-Walton remains optimistic about the report’s proposed solutions and the changes that they can bring.
“Our statewide legislative agenda remains in effect,” she said. “We will continue working at the statewide level on all the things that need to happen in the surrounding counties, in the surrounding region, at the state level to break open the opportunity for housing development in those areas.
“But this report is specifically about New Haven right now to address it. New Haven can take on a much larger zoning reform. This is sort of like the low-hanging fruit. This is what can be taken on right away and that could make some significant changes, particularly if taken on as a package.”
“It’s exciting that advocates are encouraging the development of additional affordable housing,” said New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker. “We’re enthusiastically in favor of many of the things they suggested. We’re already doing a lot of the work that was outlined in the report and are energetic about doing even more.”
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Cities such as Minneapolis, Portland, and New Rochelle in New York, have similar policies to those proposed in the report to increase construction of more housing. The result of this is a greater supply of housing leading to rent prices growing at a much slower pace than in New Haven County and nationally, according to the report.
Home sales in June fell to the slowest pace since January with near-historic low inventory for sale
Donato Davis is CT Mirror’s 2023 Emma Bowen Summer Intern. He is a rising junior at the University of Connecticut.
It’s no secret that hospitals and health systems have been facing severe financial woes in the past couple years. These money problems have forced many providers to make what they likely felt were tough but necessary choices — such as shuttering underperforming service lines, laying off staff and using debt collection agencies to obtain payment from patients.
Some of these tactics have even invited negative scrutiny. However, a new report argued that commercial payers should shoulder some of the blame when it comes to how hospitals are managing their dire financial circumstances.
Compared to government payers, commercial payers take significantly longer to pay hospitals and deny claims at a higher frequency — often without a justifiable reason to do so — according to the report published by consulting firm Crowe. These delays mean that hospitals are waiting longer than they need to receive commercial payments — during a time when they need cash flow to be expedited, not needlessly delayed, the report said.
Crowe analyzed data from the more than 1,800 hospitals that use its revenue cycle analytics platform and found that about 45% of a typical hospital’s patient population is covered by a commercial health insurance carrier.
Commercially insured patients have conventionally been thought of as hospitals’ preferred population. This is because hospitals can negotiate prices with commercial payers, and these payers usually pay higher rates than government payers like Medicare and Medicaid. For the average net revenue per inpatient case, commercial plans pay $18,156.50 compared to $14,887.10 from Medicare. For outpatients, commercial plans pay $1,606.86 for the average patient case, compared to $707.30 paid by Medicare.
Reimbursement rates may be higher among commercial payers, but getting them to pay in a timely manner is an entirely different story, per the report. During the first quarter of this year, commercial payers initially denied 15.1% of inpatient and outpatient claims compared to 3.9% for Medicare over the same period, according to the report.
Crowe analyzed the claim denial category of prior authorization and precertification denials. These occur when a payer denies a claim based on their decision that a provider did not get prior approval for care before it was delivered or that the care rendered wasn’t necessary based on the patient’s medical diagnosis.
Last year, the prior authorization/precertification denial rate for inpatient claims among commercial payers was 2.8%, up from 2.4% in 2021. This rate increased to 3% during the first three months of 2023, but the denial rate for traditional Medicare was just 0.2% during the same period.
Another claim denial category that the report examined is the request for information (RFI). RFI denials happen when a payer decides not to process a claim because it is missing some type of required documentation, such as a signature or copy of the medical record. In this category, commercial payers’ denial rate is 12 times higher than Medicare, the report found.
Most of the claims that commercial payers deny eventually get paid. However, the administrative effort required for hospitals to turn an initially-denied claim into a payment costs a good deal of time and money — two things in short supply at hospitals
To obtain payment from a denied claim, a provider must investigate the claim, determine what they have to do to rectify the problem and resubmit the claim — a process that can take weeks — said Colleen Hall, the managing principal for Crowe’s healthcare consulting group, in a recent interview. This process creates “an aging accounts receivable situation” for the provider and delays them from receiving much-needed cash.
“There certainly are several for-profit insurers out there. I won’t name names, but I think that those for-profit entities are in direct conflict with the nonprofit hospitals. I don’t know what goes on in the for-profit payer side of things, but could there be actions that they’re deploying to delay payments? Potentially. There have certainly been denials that our clients, as providers, have to manage only to find were denied for no reason,” Hall declared.
In the first quarter of this year, about a third of the claims that providers submitted to commercial payers took more than three months to get paid, the report found.
It’s difficult for hospitals to gain steady financial footing when the payers that have the best reimbursement rates are holding onto a third of their claims payments for more than 90 days, Hall pointed out.
Photo: santima.studio, Getty Images
Geraldine Tyler, now 94, lost her one-bedroom condo in Minneapolis over $2,300 in unpaid taxes, plus interest and penalties. Hennepin County sold the apartment for $40,000 and kept every penny.
Tyler’s lawyers say the county violated constitutional protections against having property taken without “just compensation” and excessive fines. The Supreme Court, which hears arguments Wednesday, will decide.
Minnesota is among roughly a dozen states and the District of Columbia that allow local jurisdictions to keep the excess money, according to the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing Tyler at the Supreme Court.
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At least 8,950 homes were sold because of unpaid taxes and the former owners received little or nothing in those states between 2014 and 2021, according to Pacific Legal, a not-for-profit public interest law firm focused on property rights.
Other states are: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and South Dakota, the group said.
There has been no explanation about why Tyler stopped paying her property taxes when she moved from the condo, where she had lived since 1999, to an apartment building for older people in 2010. She moved for “health and safety” reasons, Pacific Legal said.
The county said in court papers that Tyler could have sold the property and kept whatever was left after paying off the mortgage and taxes, refinanced her mortgage to pay the tax bill or signed up for a tax payment plan.
Instead, she did nothing for five years, the county said, until after authorities followed state law and sold the condo. The county wrote: Tyler believes “the Constitution required the State to serve as her real estate agent, sell the property on her behalf, and write a check for the difference between the tax debt and the fair market value.”
Lower courts sided with the county before the justices agreed to step in.
Minnesota and a handful of states and government associations are backing the county, warning that a Supreme Court ruling could tie the hands of local governments that rely on property taxes.
But the bulk of support in court filings is with Tyler, including AARP, business groups, real estate interests and other people who have gone through experiences similar to hers.
A Massachusetts man described his ongoing fight with authorities over a tax bill of $900 on a property he says is worth at least $330,000 in a beach town on Cape Cod Bay. In a filing from New York, property tax attorney David Wilkes and legal services groups wrote that New York’s rules “excessively takes far more than what is due to the government and go well beyond an appropriate deterrent to those homeowners who would ignore a tax delinquency.”
The Biden administration told the court that Tyler’s claim that her property was taken without just compensation, in violation of the 5th amendment, is the stronger of her arguments. The justices should reject the claim that Minnesota’s law violates the 8th amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote.
Not until 2019 did the Supreme Court rule that the “excessive fines” clause applied to the states as well as the federal government.
A decision in Tyler v. Hennepin County, Minnesota, 22-166, is expected by late June.
Oshi Health — a virtual care provider for patients with digestive disorders — announced its first contract with a commercial insurer on Thursday. The New York-based company has entered into a value-based contract that provides Aetna members with in-network access to its specialized treatment.
The partnership comes nearly two years after CVS Health, Aetna’s parent company, invested in Oshi as part of the startup’s Series A fundraising.
Founded in 2019, Oshi built a virtual-first care platform designed to help patients achieve lasting control over chronic digestive conditions. The company hires gastroenterologists, nurse practitioners, dieticians and GI-specialized behavioral healthcare providers to quickly reach a diagnosis and guide individualized treatment. Patients are also assigned a care coordinator, who can help them find in-network providers if they need services like a colonoscopy or endoscopy.
The startup prides itself on providing whole-person care, which includes often-neglected dietary and psychosocial interventions, Oshi CEO Sam Holliday said in a recent interview.
“Over the past decade, there’s been a recognition that many gastrointestinal disorders are actually triggered by the signaling between your gut and your brain. A whole class of GI conditions has actually been renamed as disorders of the gut-brain interaction, or DGBIs,” he explained. “Things like gut-directed cognitive behavioral therapy can really reframe patients’ thought patterns and dampen the brain signaling that causes their symptoms, making symptoms feel less severe.”
Dietary interventions and behavioral therapy are proven methods to alleviate GI patients’ symptoms, and they’re often more effective than medication, Holliday pointed out. But these services are rarely available to GI patients because they haven’t been reimbursed historically, he added.
That’s why these interventions are a core part of the care patients receive under Oshi’s new contract with Aetna.
“One of the challenges in GI is that there aren’t very good quality measures. Really, the main things we focus on as a country is getting people screened for colorectal cancer, But we don’t really have measures for what matters to patients, who are the people suffering. What we think is the best measure to use is symptom control,” Holliday explained.
The root cause of GI symptoms usually stems from dietary or behavioral health reasons, and traditional, medication-centric GI care does not address those underlying causes, he declared. Patients end up continually seeking care — and driving costs up — because their symptoms are still bothering them. Through Oshi’s value-based contract with Aetna, “the value aspect being measured is Oshi’s ability to reduce that utilization downstream,” Holliday said.
Oshi will measure its care teams’ ability to sustainably control patients’ symptoms through a mix of medication, dietary adjustments and gut-brain psychology interventions. The company will track metrics such as reductions in emergency department visits and patients’ reported symptoms.
“We get paid a certain amount as we’re providing the care. Then, if we’ve gotten to a good level of patient satisfaction, symptom control and reduced utilization at the end of the measurement period, we have a bonus opportunity. And if we don’t achieve certain levels, there is a downside,” Holliday explained.
Aetna shares in the upside if Oshi hits its goals, but the payer is protected against potential downside. If Oshi doesn’t achieve as good outcomes as the partners had hoped, Aetna won’t have to pay the startup the full amount for care, Holliday declared.
The partnership is in its first phase, meaning Aetna members can access Oshi’s services in the following six states: Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.
Photo: TLFurrer, Getty Images
Paragonix Technologies — a company that launched in 2010 as a response to the lack of innovation in the donor organ preservation and transport process — closed a Series B funding round on Tuesday. The $24 million round was led by Signet Healthcare Partners.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company provides transplant centers and organ procurement organizations (OPOs) with medical devices designed for the preservation and transportation of donor organs.
The traditional method of preservation requires the organ to be transported in a cooler of crushed ice. Due to unstable temperatures, many facilities that receive organs preserved in this manner report that they arrive frozen and damaged, said Paragonix CEO Lisa Anderson.
“Paragonix determined there was an opportunity for a more scientifically reproducible, measurable and reliable solution to transporting an organ from a donor to recipient,” she said. “We set out to create a new standard for organ preservation and transport that would provide the care and quality of handling commensurate with transporting such a valuable gift and improve patient outcomes worldwide.”
Paragonix’s devices are made from a series of interconnected systems that work together to provide a cool and sterile environment within a consistent range of 4-8° Celsius. The company sells three devices, each designed for a different organ (heart, lung and liver). All have been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration.
Each device works slightly differently based on specific user needs related to the organ type, Anderson said. For example, the heart preservation device has pouches filled with proprietary cooling solutions that keep the organ at optimal temperatures during transport. The heart is contained within a nested canister and is then housed in a wheeled shipper container that works to protect and insulate the inner contents.
All of Paragonix’s devices display the organ’s temperature while it is being transported. They also use bluetooth monitoring and tracking technology to allow surgeons to track the organ’s exact location throughout its journey, even in flight, Anderson pointed out.
Paragonix markets and sells its devices to transplant centers and OPOs across the U.S. and Europe. Last year, over one in five thoracic donor organs transplanted in the U.S. were preserved using a Paragonix device, Anderson declared. She also said that 19 out of the 30 largest U.S. heart transplant programs rely on Paragonix devices to safely preserve, track and transport organs to their intended recipients.
There are a few other companies that make devices to preserve donor organs, such as Organ Recovery Systems and Bridge to Life. But Anderson contended Paragonix’s devices are easier to use.
“Most other organ preservation devices are extremely complicated, labor intensive and require special personal or extensive training, while Paragonix’s devices are lightweight, user friendly, and a user can be trained in less than an hour,” she declared.
Anderson explained that her company’s main competition is the legacy way of transporting organs, as many organizations still receive damaged organs that were transported using the over-ice method. The medical industry needs to move away from this method of organ preservation because devices like the ones that Paragonix sells are clinically proven to improve patient outcomes and reduce the risk of post-surgical complications, she declared.
Picture: Getty Images, ThomasVogel
The rift between hospitals and commercial insurers is age old. But a new survey shows the relationship isn’t going to improve any time soon.
The American Hospital Association (AHA) survey, released Wednesday, found that 78% of hospitals and health systems said their relationship with commercial insurers is getting worse. Less than 1% said their relationship is improving and the rest said it has stayed the same.
The survey included 304 respondents representing 772 hospitals. All of the respondents are members of AHA.
One of the main culprits behind the worsening relationship appears to be certain practices of commercial insurers, such as prior authorization. The report found that 95% of hospitals and health systems said staff time spent seeking prior authorization approval is increasing. Meanwhile, 62% of prior authorization denials are eventually overturned, the report found.
Aside from time spent on administrative procedures, costs may also be a factor in the relationship souring. A whopping 84% said the cost of complying with insurer policies is also increasing.
“Misuse of utilization management tools like prior authorization has several negative implications for patients and the health care system,” AHA said in the report. “Prior authorization denials can result in delays of necessary treatment for patients and ultimately lead to unexpected medical bills. The extensive approval process that doctors and nurses must go through adds wasted dollars to the health care system through overuse of prior authorization, inefficient submission processes, excessive requests for unnecessary documentation and the need to reprocess inappropriate payment and coverage denials.”
AHA also takes issue with claims denials, stating that commercial health insurers are “increasingly delaying and denying coverage of medically necessary care.” However, 50% of claims denials that are appealed are overturned, AHA said.
There are financial consequences to these delays and denials, AHA stated. The survey found that 50% of hospitals have more than $100 million in accounts receivable for claims that are older than six months, totaling $6.4 billion in delayed or potentially unpaid claims among the 772 hospitals in the survey. Another 35% of respondents said they’ve lost $50 million or more in revenue because of denied claims.
“These payment delays and denials for medically necessary care have serious implications for the financial stability of health care providers and compound fiscal challenges plaguing our health care system,” AHA said.
The report also provided several policy recommendations, including streamlining the prior authorization process and increasing oversight on insurers. Additionally, the organization sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Labor, calling for action against commercial payers.
“Health care coverage must work better for patients and the providers who care for them. We urge you to take additional steps to ensure adequate oversight of commercial health plans, including those offering Medicare Advantage plans, this open enrollment season,” the letter stated. “Individuals and families should feel assured that the plan they choose during open enrollment will actually be there for them when they need care.”
America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) declined to comment publicly on AHA’s survey, but previously told MedCity News that commercial insurers’ practices are needed to reduce expenses for patients.
“Health insurance providers advocate for the people they serve by ensuring that the right care is delivered at the right time in the right setting — and covered at a cost that patients can afford. Prior authorization prevents waste and improves affordability for patients, consumers, and employers,” Kristine Grow, AHIP spokesperson, previously said. “Health insurance providers have a comprehensive view of the health care system and each patient’s medical claims history and work to ensure that medications or treatments prescribed by clinicians are safe, effective, and affordable for patients. This results in better outcomes and lower costs for patients.”
Photo: santima.studio, Getty Images