The Effect of Extending the Window to Disenroll From Medicare Advantage Among Post-Acute Users.

Post-acute care users in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans may seek coverage changes if facing issues with plan benefits. In 2019, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services extended the deadline to disenroll from an MA plan from February 14 to March 31 and, for the first time, permitted beneficiaries to switch to a different MA plan instead of traditional Medicare. Using 2016-2019 Medicare administrative data, we implemented a difference-in-differences approach to evaluate the impact of this policy on disenrollment from a plan within 1 month of initiating skilled nursing facility or home health services.

Medicare Advantage Networks Include Few Black Or Hispanic Physicians, Making Concordant Care Inaccessible For Many.

Black and Hispanic patients who receive care from Black and Hispanic physicians have greater use of preventive care. However, receiving care from racially concordant physicians requires that such physicians are included in private insurance plan networks. Using data from 2019, we examined the extent to which racially concordant physicians are available in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program, which disproportionately enrolls Black and Hispanic Medicare beneficiaries, by linking MA physician networks to physician race and ethnicity to measure the diversity of in-network physicians.

Combining Patient Survey Data With Diagnosis Codes Improved Medicare Advantage Risk-Adjustment Accuracy.

Under the current Medicare Advantage (MA) risk-adjustment system, plans are incentivized to report diagnosis codes on enrollees' medical claims reflecting additional and more severe health conditions to increase enrollees' risk scores and corresponding plan payments. To improve the integrity of risk adjustment, researchers have proposed four alternative methods to construct risk scores: calculate Hierarchical Condition Categories (HCC) scores excluding diagnosis codes from health risk assessments and chart reviews, calculate HCC scores excluding diagnosis codes most subject to score inflation, use pharmaceutical claims alone, and use self-reported survey responses alone or in combination with diagnosis codes. Using 2016-19 medical and pharmaceutical claims linked to Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey responses from 151,432 MA enrollees, we compared the predictive accuracy of each alternative strategy with the standard HCC approach.

Multicohort Analysis of Bronchial Epithelial Cell Expression in Healthy Subjects and Patients with Asthma Reveals Four Clinically Distinct Clusters.

Asthma is a heterogeneous disease with variable presentation and characteristics. There is a critical need to identify underlying molecular endotypes of asthma. We performed the largest transcriptomic analysis of 808 bronchial epithelial cell (BEC) samples across 11 independent cohorts, including 3 cohorts from the Severe Asthma Research Program (SARP).

Excess Diagnosis Coding In Medicare Advantage: Evidence From Skilled Nursing Facility Clinical Assessments.

Some research suggests that risk adjustment plays a substantial role in explaining the high levels of government spending on Medicare Advantage (MA). We studied whether the reliance on diagnosis codes to risk-adjust payments to MA plans leads to the inflation of submitted diagnoses. Our approach relied on a comparison among diagnoses included in hospital claims, health status measures from similarly timed health assessments completed by skilled nursing facility (SNF) clinicians, and short-term mortality data.