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StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective – Gather Ye Sugar Plums While Ye May; Your Personal Discretionary Budget will be Impacted by Washington

Strategy Driven

But ‘tis the season for budgeting for the New Year as well. Unless otherwise averted, your Christmas/Holiday or otherwise discretionary budget will fade next year to infinity and beyond. More than 80 percent of employers provide health care insurance to employees but this will drop considerably, if not by 50 percent.

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4 Steps to Sustaining Improvement in Health Care

Harvard Business Review

No one wants to toil away at a health care improvement effort only to see that progress disappear as systems and processes revert to the old way of doing things. Leading health care organizations recognize that improving care isn’t enough; having a systematic approach to sustaining improvement is equally important.

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The Cure for the Common Corporate Wellness Program

Harvard Business Review

But human resources departments can reconfigure their offerings so they are embraced, not resented. How can one be sure their position is not driven by genuine health concerns but rather by a desire for more control? Second, wellness has become a marketing tool for health plans, nowhere more so than at Aetna.

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Start the Year in the Right Rhythm

Harvard Business Review

From my experience, there are at least three types of cadence that leaders need to create: Planning and Budgeting: First, leaders need to make sure that an effective planning and budgeting cycle is in place at an organization level. This is the cadence that forces people to set strategies and goals and translate them into plans.

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How to Design a Bundled Payment Around Value

Harvard Business Review

The traditional fee-for-service reimbursement model is widely acknowledged to be a major driver of escalating health care costs. Harvard Pilgrim agreed to join the effort because it recognized that traditional payment models were unlikely to help control rising health care costs. Leading Health Care Innovation.

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Health Systems Need to Completely Reassess How They Manage Costs

Harvard Business Review

An investor-owned hospital executive whose company had acquired major nonprofit health care enterprises compared the proliferation of contracts to the growth of barnacles on the bottom of a freighter. To avoid this danger requires a discerning talent-management capacity in the human resources department.

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All Boards Need a Technology Expert

Harvard Business Review

Fax machines remain the preferred way to share health care data in most countries despite the fact that the cloud could theoretically allow clinicians to instantaneously share medical records. Consumer banking is one — layers of technology have been implemented since the 1960s and almost nothing has been taken out.