Together, athenahealth and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) have undertaken a new joint venture called ACAView, as part of the foundation’s Reform by the Numbers project, a source for timely and unique data on the impact of health reform.
The goal of ACAView is to provide current, non-partisan measurement and analysis on how coverage expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is affecting the day-to-day practice of medicine. athenahealth provides a single-instance, cloud-based software platform to a national provider base.
Any information that our clients enter using our software is immediately aggregated into centrally hosted databases, providing us with timely visibility into patient characteristics, clinical activities, and practice economics at medical groups around the country.
Many of the discrete analyses for this project examine a sample of our clients – about 14,300 providers (physicians, nurse practitioners, and physicians’ assistants) who have used athenahealth software continuously since before 2011. Within this sample, 35 percent of providers are primary care providers, 7 percent pediatric providers, and 58 percent specialists.
Relative to the U.S. as a whole, our clients consist of somewhat fewer solo practitioners and see slightly fewer Medicaid and uninsured patients. In other respects, our client base is reasonably representative of U.S. physicians. The physicians and other providers in the sample receive approximately 2.5 million visits per month.
Over the course of the year, ACAView will introduce a total of 35 metrics to capture the impact of coverage expansion on various aspects of physician practice. Eight metrics focusing on new patient visits and prevalence of certain chronic conditions by payer class have been introduced to date. (New patients are defined as patients who have not visited a practice in the preceding two calendar years. A new patient is considered new for successive visits over the course of the year. For example, a patient who did not visit a practice between 2011 and 2012 is defined as new for the entirety of 2013.)
Read the full article here.
Contact Steven Cosby with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.