As a postpartum doula, Dawn Oliver does her best work in the middle of the night. During a typical shift, she shows up at her clients’ home at 10 p.m. She answers questions they may have about basic infant care and keeps an eye out for signs of postpartum depression. After bedtime, she may feed the baby a bottle or wake the mother to breastfeed. She soothes the infant back to sleep. Sometimes,...
If you’re a healthcare provider working under DCE (ACO Reach or ACO MSSP models), you’ve likely experienced the unique challenges of shared savings agreements. These programs can be a fantastic tool for improving care coordination and reducing costs, but as an attorney who has worked extensively in this field, I’ve seen firsthand how complex and frustrating these agreements can become. One of...
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. In the U.S., the price of Revlimid, a brand-name cancer drug, has been increasing for two decades. It now sells for nearly $1,000 a pill. In Europe, the price has been consistently lower — in some countries by two-thirds. I started reporting on...
The first report from the Make America Healthy Again Commission is out, with a particular focus on children’s health. The relatively short report includes astonishing data on obesity, heart disease, diabetes, life expectancy, substance abuse, mental illness, and many other terribles. The report is a shock, a painful read, a five-alarm fire, and the charts alone are astonishing. It is embedded...
Sumana Reddy, a primary care physician, struggles on thin financial margins to run Acacia Family Medical Group, the small independent practice she founded 27 years ago in Salinas, a predominantly Latino city in an agricultural valley often called “the salad bowl of the world.” Reddy can’t match the salaries offered by larger health systems — a difficulty compounded by a widespread shortage of...
The healthcare industry often uses the titles Medical Director and Supervising Physician interchangeably, but they’re quite different. A Medical Director is usually a position created and required by a specific law. In contrast, a Supervising or Collaborating Physician is one that a nurse practitioner or physician assistant is required to have on file with their respective licensing boards. And...
