February 2018

Can Paramedics Help Achieve the Triple Aim?

High performance health systems of the future have been challenged to create integrated approaches that focus on improving the health of populations, improving the patient experience of care from a quality and satisfaction perspective, and reducing the per capita cost of healthcare. MedStar Mobile Healthcare, a governmental ambulance agency, is the exclusive provider for emergency and non-emergency services in Fort Worth and 14 surrounding cities in Texas. Year over year, MedStar was receiving a high proportion of calls that did not require an emergency response, many of which were from the same individuals who called again and again. These individuals, called "high utilizers," were costing MedStar a lot of money and staff time. To help remedy this loss and give these individuals the type of care they truly needed, MedStar created Mobile Integrated Healthcare (MIH), consisting of programs that took a different approach to patient care by collaborating with various stakeholders in the community to provide care using the right resource to ensure the right outcome. MIH serves to fill gaps in patient care and navigate patients to the most appropriate resources using a patient-centric approach.

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November 2017

Saving Lives through Advance Market Commitments

Vaccinations are one of the best investments for long-term impact in global health. One of the biggest challenges to seizing this opportunity is aligning the economic forces of the market with the desired outcome—more vaccinations developed and delivered at an affordable price. The traditional approach to funding vaccine development is a system that pays for research and development rather than results. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) sought to address this problem by implementing a non-traditional model known as an Advance Market Commitment (AMC) that pays for a new affordable pneumococcal vaccine rather than simply the research outputs.

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September 2017

City of Seattle Reorients Homeless Services Toward Outcomes with Results-Driven Contracting

In 2015, the Mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray, declared a state of emergency. The city had spent years trying to address the challenge of homelessness – it had increased its budget, signed and renewed countless contracts with skilled and dedicated service providers, and invested in contracts that tackled the problem from many different angles.

Despite Seattle’s rising investments – $50 million in 2016 – its homeless population also continued increasing at around 13% per year from 2011 to 2016. The government’s investment and the efforts of its 60 enlisted service providers weren’t achieving the long-term results they sought.

So when Mayor Murray established the city’s Office of Policy and Innovation, reducing homelessness was one of its top priorities.

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