{"id":740,"date":"2014-04-11T16:39:28","date_gmt":"2014-04-11T20:39:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/?p=740"},"modified":"2014-05-11T20:16:11","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T00:16:11","slug":"medicares-flawed-adjustment-methodology-poor-way-to-spend-billions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/2014\/medicares-flawed-adjustment-methodology-poor-way-to-spend-billions\/","title":{"rendered":"Medicare\u2019s Flawed Adjustment Methodology Poor Way to Spend Billions"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>New Dartmouth study in the journal <em>BMJ<\/em> offers roadmap for better risk adjustment<\/h3>\n<p>Lebanon, N.H. (April 10, 2014) \u2013 The\u00a0 methodology Medicare uses to adjust the billions of dollars it pays health plans and hospitals to account for how sick their patients are is flawed and should be replaced, according to a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/348\/bmj.g2392\" target=\"_blank\">new study<\/a>\u00a0by Dartmouth investigators published in the journal <em>BMJ<\/em> that weighed the performance of Medicare\u2019s methodology against alternatives.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers from the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.dartmouthatlas.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Dartmouth Atlas Project<\/a>\u00a0compared Medicare\u2019s current risk-adjustment methodology, which is based on the diagnoses recorded in patients\u2019 claims records, against adjustment indices based on wealth and health. The study found that using indices pegged to a region\u2019s poverty rate or the overall health of its population do a better job of explaining the mortality rate of local Medicare populations than the current diagnosis-based adjustment method, raising questions about its efficacy.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/tdi.dartmouth.edu\/press\/press-releases\/medicares-flawed-adjustment-methodology-poor-way-to-spend-billions\" target=\"_blank\">Read the full story here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The  methodology Medicare uses to adjust the billions of dollars it pays health plans and hospitals to account for how sick their patients are is flawed and should be replaced, according to a new study by Dartmouth investigators published in the journal <em>BMJ<\/em> that weighed the performance of Medicare\u2019s methodology against alternatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":741,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[182,15],"tags":[205,43,45],"class_list":["post-740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-release-news","category-voices","tag-medicare","tag-population-health","tag-tdi","post_format-post-format-aside","author-15"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2014\/04\/Screen-Shot-2014-04-11-at-4.37.53-PM.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-bW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1039,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions\/1039"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}