4 ms·

One very simple thing they could do that might be helpful is provide an easy to understand guidebook for understanding the quality of various healthcare provide

One very simple thing they could do that might be helpful is provide an easy to understand guidebook for understanding the quality of various healthcare providers. Sort of a Michelin guidebook for healthcare Currently, patients don't have the resources or information to assess the quality of their providers. Hospitals with fancy marble lobbies are more likely to be rated as high quality than hospitals with better quality scores but dingier interiors. People think that if care costs more, it must be better Insurance companies have tried to build narrow networks that exclude high cost hospitals that nonetheless are publicly perceived as high quality, but public backlash, however misinformed, can quash these efforts. One example is UCLA vs BSCA a few years ago

slapshot 9y ago
A few San Francisco companies seem to be doing this already: Grand Rounds, Amino, and to a much lesser extent Castlight. They sell through the employer-payer; not sure if they are competition for AmaMorganShire or potential vendors to them.
- Apocryphon 9y ago
  Does Zocdoc also count?
marcinzm 9y ago
>One very simple thing they could do that might be helpful is provide an easy to understand guidebook for understanding the quality of various healthcare providers. Sort of a Michelin guidebook for healthcare Define quality.
- aaavl2821 9y ago
  there are plenty of reasonably good definitions of quality and value-based frameworks out there. medicare defines and enforces several of these, and the amazon JV could potentially play a similar role in the commercial payer world
dragonwriter 9y ago
> One very simple thing they could do that might be helpful is provide an easy to understand guidebook for understanding the quality of various healthcare providers. That's not a simple thing to do, especially well, and you kind of implicitly note with your reference to existing quality ratings that lots of people have tried to do it with mediocre results.
- aaavl2821 9y ago
  I think there is an opportunity for the amazon / BH / JPM JV to use its scale, visibility and "outsider" status to create a standard that is simple and easy to understand by consumers, and actively market that standard in a way that medicare, startups or industry coalitions have not been able to most quality standards are not even well known or standardized within the healthcare industry, and there are so many competing interests that it is hard for providers, payers, other stakeholders to align on a standard, useful and enforceable definition of quality. the JV is already insanely visible / high profile without anyone knowing what it does; if they create a quality rating system it will certainly get more attention than any other one created to date also, amazon / bh / jpm in theory is better aligned with society in terms of what they want out of healthcare: 1) lower cost and 2) customer satisfaction. that group cares about making its employees happy, whereas other stakeholders dont have the same direct accountability to employees / patients: payers are only accountable to patients through the employers they serve, and providers are in theory accountable to patients but in reality more influenced by the health system that owns them or the payer that pays them
  - nradov 9y ago
    The major quality standards are published by CMS (Medicare) and they're very well known because reimbursement is now tied to hitting those metrics. But in a broader sense it's really impossible to define objective quality metrics for individual healthcare providers. If a heart surgeon has a high patient death rate is it because she's incompetent or because she takes on the most fragile patients that no one else is willing to operate on? You might think that those differences could be controlled for but in reality there are too many confounding factors and research hasn't even been done to accurately quantify many of them.
junkscience2017 9y ago
If a "guidebook" is all that results from this, the world will be profoundly disappointed Fixing healthcare in the US will require new vertical integrations, not just tools to navigate the existing system

slapshot 9y ago

A few San Francisco companies seem to be doing this already: Grand Rounds, Amino, and to a much lesser extent Castlight. They sell through the employer-payer; not sure if they are competition for AmaMorganShire or potential vendors to them.

Apocryphon 9y ago
Does Zocdoc also count?

marcinzm 9y ago

>One very simple thing they could do that might be helpful is provide an easy to understand guidebook for understanding the quality of various healthcare providers. Sort of a Michelin guidebook for healthcare Define quality.

aaavl2821 9y ago
there are plenty of reasonably good definitions of quality and value-based frameworks out there. medicare defines and enforces several of these, and the amazon JV could potentially play a similar role in the commercial payer world

dragonwriter 9y ago

> One very simple thing they could do that might be helpful is provide an easy to understand guidebook for understanding the quality of various healthcare providers. That's not a simple thing to do, especially well, and you kind of implicitly note with your reference to existing quality ratings that lots of people have tried to do it with mediocre results.

aaavl2821 9y ago
I think there is an opportunity for the amazon / BH / JPM JV to use its scale, visibility and "outsider" status to create a standard that is simple and easy to understand by consumers, and actively market that standard in a way that medicare, startups or industry coalitions have not been able to most quality standards are not even well known or standardized within the healthcare industry, and there are so many competing interests that it is hard for providers, payers, other stakeholders to align on a standard, useful and enforceable definition of quality. the JV is already insanely visible / high profile without anyone knowing what it does; if they create a quality rating system it will certainly get more attention than any other one created to date also, amazon / bh / jpm in theory is better aligned with society in terms of what they want out of healthcare: 1) lower cost and 2) customer satisfaction. that group cares about making its employees happy, whereas other stakeholders dont have the same direct accountability to employees / patients: payers are only accountable to patients through the employers they serve, and providers are in theory accountable to patients but in reality more influenced by the health system that owns them or the payer that pays them
- nradov 9y ago
  The major quality standards are published by CMS (Medicare) and they're very well known because reimbursement is now tied to hitting those metrics. But in a broader sense it's really impossible to define objective quality metrics for individual healthcare providers. If a heart surgeon has a high patient death rate is it because she's incompetent or because she takes on the most fragile patients that no one else is willing to operate on? You might think that those differences could be controlled for but in reality there are too many confounding factors and research hasn't even been done to accurately quantify many of them.

junkscience2017 9y ago

If a "guidebook" is all that results from this, the world will be profoundly disappointed Fixing healthcare in the US will require new vertical integrations, not just tools to navigate the existing system