How do we help employers help their employees?

The employer market covers 180 million people in the United States—the largest payer of health care services.

On this episode of “Inside Health Care”, NCQA welcomes Ellen Kelsay, Chief Strategy Officer for the National Business Group on Health. Based in Washington, D.C, the Business Group is a nonprofit membership-based organization that works with large self-funded employers on a variety of health and well-being related issues.

In this episode, Ellen discusses how the Business Group is there to help companies improve health care quality among their employees—this impacts employee productivity, engagement, wellness and more.

Improvements are being made but there is still a gap—so, what is the employer’s role? What are the challenges?

Listen to the episode below to find out more. Be sure to rate us where you listen to podcasts!

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NCQA President Peggy O’Kane discusses her appointment to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Quality Summit group. Peggy is serving among some of the nation’s top health care policy leaders to advise the government on the challenges ahead and the proposed solutions to address them. NCQA Public Policy Vice President Frank Micciche asks the questions. The two also discuss the on-again, off-again controversial proposals to assign each American with a number–a unique patient identifier.

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We are facing a national crisis. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, each day more than 130 people in the United States die from an opioid overdose. How are health care professionals tackling this issue?

On this episode of “Inside Health Care,” we chat with Dr. Daniel Alford, Professor of Medicine and course director for Boston University School of Medicine’s “SCOPE of Pain” safer opioid-prescribing program. SCOPE of Pain is a series of continuing medical/nursing education activities designed to help safely and effectively manage patients with acute and/or chronic pain with opioid analgesics, when appropriate.

In this episode, Dr. Alford discusses how SCOPE of Pain addresses medical school and residency teaching gaps by training health care professionals—more than 160,000 thus far—how to prescribe and use opioids safely and effectively. Dr. Alford also discusses how to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of opioids and proposes his solution to ending the opioid crisis.

Listen to the episode below to hear more—and don’t forget to rate us where you listen to podcasts!

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On this edition of “Inside Health Care” we catch up with NCQA Founder and President, Peggy O’ Kane at the Digital Quality Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. O’Kane visits with NCQA Asst. Vice President Andy Reynolds, External Relations. They discuss the Summit, the future of Digital Quality and much more.

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Peggy’s already planning her next visit. We hope you will stay tuned.

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People get their health care from many different places, and information about their health sits in those many different places. Why does this matter? For providers caring for patients, a fuller picture of the care their patient has received means the provider has the tools to understand their needs and make better recommendations. The HEDIS ECDS measures promote that principle. ECDS stands for “electronic clinical data systems.” That includes everything from electronic health records and case management systems, to registries and claims data for measure reporting. ECDS measures encourage health plans to get and share health information electronically with health care providers so that all may better manage their members.

ECDS is a new data reporting method. We know learning something new always means bumps along the way. We learn from those bumps. Then, we improve.

That approach has already yielded significant progress for the ECDS domain. “ECDS Experience” is a new project that shares how health plans are developing solutions for collecting and reporting ECDS measures.

Inside Health Care introduces our first “ECDS Experience” story. NCQA’s Catherine Clair sits down with Pete Stoessel of AmeriHealth Caritas District of Columbia to talk about why ECDS is so important now and how his team is making progress with collecting data for ECDS measures.

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