Health plans play an integral part of the health care delivery system and have developed innovative programs to help patients receive the care they need.
AHIP Publications
Innovations in Reducing Preventable Hospital Admissions, Readmissions, and Emergency Room Use (Highlights)
A review of health plan programs to revitalize primary care, improve care coordination, and help patients avoid adverse health events.
Health Insurance Plans Making a Difference: Driving Quality Improvement and Accountability
As the nation grapples with the urgent challenges of ensuring all Americans have access to quality, affordable care, health insurance plans are forging ahead with initiatives to improve health care quality through reporting and payment reforms that promote value, encourage ongoing improvement, and advance high-quality health care. To get a better sense of the scope and variety of health plan programs and initiatives targeting quality improvement, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) surveyed a representative sample of commercial and Medicare Advantage member health insurance plans representing more than 95,000,000 covered lives. The survey data, collected in 2009, demonstrate health plan activities and programs that improve quality of care, patient safety, and reduce costs to the health care system. The following report highlights data from the survey.
Innovations in Recognizing and Rewarding Quality
A monograph that highlights some of the most innovative approaches that regional and national health insurance plans have taken to advance quality of care and efficiency through the recognition and reward of physicians and hospitals for achieving national benchmarks, demonstrating outstanding performance and making measurable improvements over time. Among the twenty-eight featured programs, some focus on physicians; others focus on hospitals; others involve multi-stakeholder collaborations.
AHIP’s Report on how Health Insurance Plans Provide Value-Added Services to Consumers
Health insurance plans have developed a new generation of strategies that are improving the quality of health care. These strategies include promoting prevention and wellness to keep people healthy and reduce health care costs for everyone; helping people with chronic illnesses lead longer, fuller, healthier lives; taking unnecessary costs out of the system for patients, employers and taxpayers; helping people get the medicines they need while working to hold down prescription drug cost increases; and investing in secure, cutting-edge information technology to cut paperwork, empower patients and providers, speed claims processing and reduce costs.
Innovations in Chronic Care
A compendium of health plan programs to improve quality of life for members with cancer, chronic pain, depression, asthma, diabetes, and other chronic conditions, and to address obesity among children and adults.
Trends and Innovations in Chronic Disease Prevention & Treatment: An Update on Medicare Advantage Plans
An overview of key trends in chronic care, highlighting Medicare Advantage plans' recent innovations.
Health Plan Innovations in Prevention, Wellness and Risk Reduction
AHIP’s Innovations in Prevention, Wellness and Risk Reduction monograph highlights innovative initiatives that capture health insurance plans’ commitment to programs that prevent disease and improve the lives of their members and their communities by helping them stay well. The publication features forty company profiles and essays by five noted experts who explore the reasons why the related challenges of prevention, wellness and risk reduction for chronic disease require both innovative and comprehensive responses.
AHIP Releases Recommendations for Addressing Obesity
AHIP’s white paper, Facing the Challenge of Unhealthy Weight: Recommendations for the Health Care Community, offers several recommendations and examines promising programs that health insurance plans and clinicians have developed in collaboration with community partners to encourage body mass index (BMI) screening and address the obesity epidemic. Recommendations include making routine BMI screening and interpretation a standard clinical practice; connecting BMI screening to evidence-based prevention and treatment options; and building partnerships and disseminating promising practices among health plans, physicians and clinicians, employers and community groups.
Trends and Innovations in Health Information Technology
Highlights of health plans' IT initiatives to improve health care quality and efficiency.
A New Generation of Behavioral Health Coverage: Perspectives from Interviews with Medical Leaders
A snapshot of health insurance plans' latest tools to promote excellence in behavioral health care.
Ensuring Quality Through Appropriate Use of Diagnostic Imaging
A white paper that highlights health plan strategies that are working to address the quality, patient safety, and cost issues that our nation faces in the use of high tech imaging.
AHIP Initiatives
Addressing Disparities in Health
Recognizing the importance of understanding cultural differences and their impact on accessing appropriate health care services, AHIP's disparities work aims to increase awareness of the influence of race, ethnicity, and primary language on health outcomes; collaborate with other stakeholders to develop tools and resources for evidence-based research and practice; and develop effective strategies that help contribute to reducing inequity across the health care system.
Coverage Magazine Articles
Quality First
Private sector initiatives inform government effort to control escalating use of high-tech diagnostic imaging.
Preventing the Preventable
Health plans implement high-tech and low-tech solutions aimed at reducing hospital medication errors.
What the Doctor Ordered
Health plans take steps to ensure members adhere to their medication regimens.
Early Intervention
Childhood obesity programs aim to put kids on a new, healthier path to adulthood.
