A Money Back Guarantee in Health Care? You Bet!

Who cares about the color, so
long as it catches mice?

Talk about disruptive.

While an unholy alliance of CMS mandarins, fawning think-tank supporters and earnest academics continue to promote their top-down "mainframe" health care ideology, along comes AMCHealth and their money back guarantee.

While the Disease Management Care Blog can only speculate on the how the contracting details would work, AMC's fundamental value proposition is pretty compelling: it promises it will reduce a client's hospital readmissions by "at least 10% within 90 days of deployment" or your money back. AMC is confident it can use interactive voice response (IVR) technology and nurse case managers to identify and then help at-risk patients who might otherwise have to be rehospitalized when things are not going well.

In the meantime, the prevailing Washington DC health reform ideology is that hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and community organizations large and small should pool and sort existing resources under the twin banners of integration and coordination. Mix the solar power of CMS' innovations, the fiscal wisdom of the White House's insurance experts, the academisphere's eternally funded prospective research studies and politically targeted community grants and, if the Feds have their way, the nation's health care non-system will morph into large regional and regulated utilities. Twenty percent of the national GDP will be under the firm control of CMS.

Maybe the DMCB is being overly suspicious. That being said, many of the academics, regulators and government long-timers who are presiding over the medical-industrial complex have made no secret of their disdain of outsider-run care management to the DMCB in meetings and conversations. Using Deng Xiaoping's famous observation, they want their cats to be only one color.

The entrepreneurial AMCs of the health care world are a threat to that vision.  Not only are they a viable business option for impressive organizations like this, they've backed up their claims in the peer-reviewed literature.

If these for-profits succeed, the mainframe healthcare ideology could go the way of dinosaurs, FEMA and Amtrak. By offering solutions that are faster, cheaper and guaranteed, the ultimate success for health care institutions won't lay securing local monopolies but the decentralized and organic business approaches with a mix of build or buy being used in other sectors of the economy.

Image from Wikipedia