State News

State health officials in Minnesota are alarmed by the high number of incidents of adverse health events reported in a statewide report in March 2019, reports Modern Healthcare. The state requires hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to report the 29 adverse events called "never events," but it's difficult for the Minnesota Health Department to get a sense of what the numbers mean, as this set of 29 events only represents a small percentage of situations. The state is considering tracking diagnostic errors and expanding the program to other settings where patients now get care, like outpatient clinics, as well as releasing an aggregate report of events from across the state, rather than reporting them by facility. 

Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina released a report in JAMA Pediatrics that associates a school-based telehealth program with reduced emergency department visits for children with asthma in a rural and underserved region of South Carolina, reports Healthcare Finance. Children with access to school-based telehealth were 21 percent less likely to visit the emergency department for asthma than those without access, but the three-year study showed no association between school-based telehealth and all-cause emergency department visits.

A California man with a progressive lung disease was charged more for a 27-mile air ambulance ride than the double lung transplant that saved his life, reports Kaiser Health News. Air ambulance companies are one of the worst offenders when it comes generating surprise medical bills due to their widespread use in emergency situations and tendency to remain out-of-network. Because air ambulance providers are primarily regulated by federal aviation authorities, there are limits to the consumer protections states can provide. In October 2019, California passed a law to cap out-of-pocket costs for air ambulance rides at in-network amounts, even if the company is out of network. However, the law only protects a subset of privately insured patients under the state’s jurisdiction.

Lawmakers in Wyoming have voted to extend the state’s multi-payer claims database which revealed that the costs of healthcare are the highest in the region and among the highest in the nation, according to the Casper Star Tribune. For example, an appendectomy costs a Wyoming resident and their insurer is $21,287—nearly $7,000 more than the median national cost. In response to the data, the Labor, Health and Social Services Committee has also approved a bundled pricing bill that may reduce healthcare spending.

A 2019 analysis by the Washington Health Alliance found a 10 percent decrease in wasteful spending in the state’s commercially insured population and a 24 percent decrease in wasteful spending in the Medicaid population from 2014-2017, reports State of Reform. Despite significant progress, wasteful spending continues to be an issue, as 51 percent of the 9.5 million services examined were deemed “low-value” and likely representing unnecessary spending. 

Few Massachusetts consumers know how to get price information before a procedure, despite the state’s 5-year old transparency provisions, according to a Becker’s Hospital Review analysis of a poll by the Pioneer Institute and DAPA Research. Indeed, seventy percent of respondents said they want to know the price of a medical service before obtaining it, though thirty-two percent of respondents said they don’t know whether their insurance company has a website or cost estimator tool that would allow them to compare out-of-pocket costs. Researchers believe this shows that though the public wants transparency in their healthcare prices, easy access is not yet a reality.

D.C.’s Medicaid program is the first in the country to receive approval for a demonstration project that will use federal Medicaid money to pay for patients with severe mental illness to be treated in large residential psychiatric institutions and treatment centers, according to Modern Healthcare. Medicaid currently prohibits payments to institutions with more than 16 beds, which behavioral health advocates claim has contributed to the high unmet need for the treatment of both mental health and substance use disorders.

Researchers looking into North Carolina’s Medicaid program released a case study detailing the poor health outcomes and high-cost Medicaid beneficiaries in Graham County, North Carolina, and paired these stories with policy recommendations to reorient the Medicaid program around patient needs, according to a Health Affairs blog post. Graham County has seen a gradual decay of outpatient care delivery infrastructure, and patients suffer from a lack of providers and lack of transportation, often forcing them to use emergency medical services as primary care or for transportation. Policy recommendations include investing in telehealth, deploying the existing workforce more efficiently, and empowering local officials by providing them with adequate funding for the increased responsibilities they shoulder.  

Florida has launched the Florida Health Price Finder website, which gives residents the ability to search for prices on non-emergency medical procedures in the state, according to ABC News. Some healthcare advocates are critical because the website only provides average numbers from a few years ago, which may be out of date. Moreover, the tool does not take Medicare and negotiated rates into account. The Florida Hospital Association has also called the validity of the data into question.