Total cost of care and health equity in Minnesota: Conversation with MNCM's Jim Chase

[audio mp3="https://healthbb.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/hbdew00028-david-e-williams-interviews-mncm-president-jim-chase.mp3"][/audio]Minnesota Community Measurement (MNCM) is a national leader in bringing together healthcare stakeholders to address important, but difficult quality and cost issues. In this podcast interview, MNCM's president Jim Chase and I discuss two new reports, one on the total cost of care and the other on health inequities.Here are the topics we covered, along with timestamps:

1. What is MNCM? (0:10)
2. You have released a total cost of care report for MN physician groups. What is total cost of care? (0:38)
3. Why does total cost of care matter? (1:16)
4. What adjustments do you make for the health status of patients in different practices? Do you exclude patients who are outliers? (1:46)
5. How applicable is the TCC metric to an individual patient deciding where to seek care? (2:56)
6. To what extent is TCC a proxy for negotiated rates as opposed to total resource use? (4:08)
7. What stakeholders were involved in bringing this report to fruition? (5:23)
8. Why do you think MN is the first state to issue a report like this? (7:23)
9. How do you pair total cost of care with quality? (8:38)
10. You’ve also recently released a Health Equity report. What kinds of inequities are included? How are they measured? (9:42)
11. What are some key differences you observe? Do they match up with the hypotheses you went in with? (11:08)
12. This is a touchy subject, so how did you get everyone to cooperate? What was MNCN’s role? (12:54)
13. Beyond identifying that there are inequities, how do you address them? (14:14)
14. Are there any explicit linkages between the TCC and Health Equities reports? (15:10)
15. It’s been a busy couple months for MNCM. What’s next? (15:52)

—By healthcare business consultant David E. Williams, president of Health Business Group.