Telling Quotes on the Medical Home from Attendees at a Disease Management Conference

The Disease Management Care Blog has discovered that when it’s a moderator for an on-stage panel discussion, it will remember nothing about what was said when the session is over. That’s because being a moderator involves focusing on the next question while everyone else is listening to the latest answer. That’s what happened to it at the DMAA Forum ’08 Conference when it led a session on commonalities between disease management and the medical home. This moderatoring stuff is hard work!

Even if the DMCB was paying better attention to the answers, however, it wouldn’t have been able to divine the audience’s reaction once the session was over. It was too busy recovering from all the stress. That responsibility belonged to Managed Care Magazine, which has a well written report on the audience’s reaction written by Maureen Glabman in its December 2008 issue.

Here are some telling quotes from the article from persons from across the payor and provider spectrum. Decide for yourself if these are the perspectives of insightful experts in population-based health care or competitors stuck on their business model or.... something else.

DMAA CEO Tracey Moorhead: ‘…an entirely new business opportunity…. Doctors may want to outsource [the technology]’

Disease Management Purchasing Consortium Al Lewis: ‘….the most overrated concept. Where are the alleged savings supposed to come from?’

Iowa Chronic Care Consortium’s William Applegate: ‘a Christmas gift to family practice docs from Congress.’

Better Health Technology’s Vince Kuraitis: ‘…it would be difficult for physicians…to develop the analytical tools, the information technology tools and the behavioral techniques that the disease management industry has developed over the past ten years. This could be the next big thing or this could fail. There are no guarantees’

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts’ David Brumley: ‘The medical home has the potential to contain health care costs….’

Kaiser Permanente’s Paul Wallace: ‘Paying for the medical home is a zero sum game – there is no cost savings.’

WellPoint’s Lisa Latts: ‘It’s a promising but untested model. Our customers are saying we’re already paying you for disease management; we don’t want to pay twice….. doctors are uncertain how to make their offices into medical home’

Take Care Health Systems’ Sharon Glave Frazee: ‘ …it’s just good primary care.’

An unnamed physician: ‘…don’t know that the medical home has proven itself. We don’t know the costs or limitations. Early adopters are entrepreneurial and willing to try new things. They are not representative of the doctor on the street.’