Care Coordination | Medicare | Chronic Care Management | Behavioral Health | Product Updates
Hello Everyone and Happy Belated Labor Day! We hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend as the summer winds to completion (I for one am not thrilled, but hey, at least we have football!) In this blog, I'll cover an area that is ripe with opportunity for improving overall quality of life through expanded care coordination efforts: Behavioral Health. Estimates show that approximately 65 million Americans are afflicted with a behavioral health condition, 13 million of whom are Medicare beneficiaries. The projected health care costs associated with these conditions is $57 billion - yes, that is billion with a “b” - a staggering amount that puts the behavioral health-related spend on a level playing field with cancer. For many years, and particularly within the Medicare community, these conditions were rarely addressed. Older adults, mostly affected by preexisting chronic conditions, generally look to their primary care physicians to provide treatment. Unfortunately, this community of providers were limited in their ability to identify – or even acknowledge – a patient’s behavioral issues, as the diagnosis and management of these issues was restricted to settings that specialized in mental health. This resulted in upwards of two-thirds of qualified Medicare beneficiaries failing to receive the appropriate care. The downstream impact on physical outcomes, in hindsight, is rather obvious – for example, a depressed patient may not feel motivated to take the actions recommended by their doctor in association with their chronic physical ailment. If we intend to effectively address the physical conditions, we first need to effectively address the behavioral ones.
Product Updates | 2018 Updates
Application of Medicare’s preventative, wellness and care management programs continue to gain traction throughout the healthcare industry. ThoroughCare’s partners continue to play their part in promoting them, leveraging our software’s capabilities to provide Chronic Care Management, Behavioral Health Intervention, Annual Wellness Visit, care coordination and preventative screening services to an aging population and successfully navigating them down the path to an improved quality of life. While physicians and their staff can sense these improvements through more consistent engagement and healthy dialogue with their patients, how do they really know that their health outcomes are, in fact, improving? Simply put: the proof is in the data.
See how ThoroughCare simplifies Medicare's most complex programs.
Chronic Care Management | 2018 Updates
The ThoroughCare team was excited to attend the 2018 Spring conference of the National Association of Rural Health Clinics (NARHC) in San Antonio Texas. The conference represented over 400 participants from Rural Health Clinics across the United States.
Medicare | Chronic Care Management
With the start of a new year, practices are ramping up their CCM programs. Patients are still working towards their "New Years Resolutions" of being healthier. Plus, with an increase of "sick visits" during these winter months, it's the perfect time to promote Annual Wellness Visits and Chronic Care Management (CCM).
Chronic Care Management | Medicare | 2018 Updates
When Medicare began the CCM (Chronic Care Management) program in 2015, practices everywhere benefited from profitable new incentives for managing their chronic Medicare patients.
On December, 1, 2016, athenahealth announced that ThoroughCare's CCM software is now GA (Generally Available) through the athenahealth MDP marketplace.
We are pleased to announce some major enhancements to our CCM product. Thanks to our customers for suggesting these as updates. We're always excited to make our solutions even better. Here are the details of the new enhancements:
Chronic Care Management | 2017 updates | Medicare
On November 15, 2016, Medicare published their official changes to the Chronic Care Management (CCM) program beginning on January 1, 2017. There are significant new changes which will enhance the program and make it easier for practices to enroll their patients. As you know, ThoroughCare's CCM Software allows practices of any size to implement an efficient CCM program. So here's our summary of the new changes:
