The Fight Over Community Care of North Carolina's Claims of Savings Continue

Nothing like academic fisticuffs to capture the Disease Management Care Blog's interest. The well timed punch that exposes a methodologic weakness.  The counter punch that quotes past research.  The bob and weave of spin and framing.  Misquoting blows below the belt. Statistical pokes in the eye.  The DMCB says it's better than foreign politicians brawling, Kill Bill sword fights and lurid professional wrestling.

Which is why it's enjoying a big dust-up over the Community Care of North Carolina's medical home initiative in the "Letters to the Editor" section of the January 2013 issue of American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC).

Regular readers may recall this early 2009 DMCB alert about the CCNC's actuarially derived claims of savings with its medical home.  Al Lewis of the Disease Management Purchasing Consortium eventually caught-up the the DMCB with his own three-fold roundhouse of a punch directed at CCNC that was published in August 2012 AJMC:

1. Claims of $250 million in avoided hospitalization costs on a baseline 2006 cost of $114 million is very unlikely,

2. Outside data indicate that Medicaid admissions in the state only fell from 36 to 34 per thousand, which also makes any claim of hundreds of millions in savings suspect, and

3. Two neighboring states without a medical home initiative experienced the same modest declines in hospitalizations without the same savings.

Well, the actuaries involved in the original Community Care report have jabbed back:

1. The baseline that was used was an actuarial projection of what costs would have been, based on prior trends, not 2006

2. The observed savings were never ascribed to avoided hospitalizations

3. The medical home initiative had been in place for many years, which could explain its impact.

The CEO of Community Care also penned his own counter-strike.  He argues:

"Evaluating complex programs is a difficult and evolving science, but [the] approach to estimating CCNC’s impact is reasonable, measured, and up to the latest standards in the field. Its analysis plays by the same actuarial rules as everyone else—including disease management vendors calculating a return on investment and insurance companies setting rates."

.The rest of the letter uses terms like "disturbing," "facile" "erroneous" "mistakes" "misrepresents" "circular references." Ouch.

The DMCB fully expects the spat to continue and looks forward to enjoying its ringside seat.  In the meantime, it's sticking to it's original point from more than 3 years ago: the CCNC analysis was an opaque actuarial analysis that was never subjected to the scrutiny (and editing) from independent peer review.  If it had been, the reviewers would have spotted many of Mr. Lewis' concerns and forced the authors to be more transparent with their methods.

Lesson learned.