New Medicare and Medicaid Findings from Harvard School of Medicine Outlined (Provider-Offered Medicare Advantage Plans: Recent Growth And Care…

New Medicare and Medicaid Findings from Harvard School of Medicine Outlined (Provider-Offered Medicare Advantage Plans: Recent Growth And Care Quality)

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Managed Care Weekly Digest -- Investigators publish new report on Medicare and Medicaid. According to news originating from Boston, Massachusetts, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, "Hospitals and health systems are increasingly offering their own insurance products, a type of consolidation known as 'vertical integration.' The relationship between plan-provider vertical integration and quality of care has not been examined extensively or over time. We created a new data set of all vertically integrated Medicare Advantage contracts operating in the period 2011-15 and tracked their characteristics and quality over time."

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from the Harvard School of Medicine, "While the percentage of vertically integrated contracts increased slightly between 2011 and 2015, the percentage of all Medicare Advantage enrollees in them declined from 24.4 percent to 22.0 percent. Vertically integrated contracts generally were of higher quality than other contracts, with the largest differences related to enrollee satisfaction."

According to the news editors, the research concluded: "These findings provide the first detailed, longitudinal look at vertically integrated Medicare Advantage plan enrollment and quality."

For more information on this research see: Provider-Offered Medicare Advantage Plans: Recent Growth And Care Quality. Health Affairs, 2017;36(3):539-547. Health Affairs can be contacted at: Project Hope, 7500 Old Georgetown Rd, Ste 600, Bethesda, MD 20814-6133, USA (see also Medicare and Medicaid).

The news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained from G. Johnson, Harvard Med Sch, Boston, MA 02115, United States. Additional authors for this research include Z.M. Lyon and A. Frakt.

Keywords for this news article include: Boston, Massachusetts, United States, North and Central America, Medicare and Medicaid, Health Policy, Medicare, Harvard School of Medicine.

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