Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Bob Kocher's recent WSJ editorial, What Medicare Could Learn from Netflix, discusses a proposed solution to help CMS improve its risk adjusted payment model to better allocate healthcare dollars for its patients.
While most of us aren't healthcare policy buffs, looking for cost effective strategies to draw on social capital to improve the delivery of governmental services seems like a win for us all. The XPRIZE foundation has created a successful model that could easily be applied to government specific challenges.
Please use the comment section to suggest other govermental challenges that you'd like the our collective knowledge to address.
The article is behind a paywall, so you need to be a subscriber to read the full story, but I have included a condensed excerpt that I found particularly interesting and hopefully will encourage you to read the entire article.
Tne way for Medicare to do better would be to emulate Netflix... Netflix ran a world-wide contest to improve... its proprietary algorithm for predicting how users would rate films they’d never seen... Within a year, over 2,000 separate teams... had submitted more than 13,000 algorithms. Eventually, the winning team... improved the algorithm by more than 10%. For a tiny cost, Netflix got a huge amount of computer-science research that even its highly skilled employees could not perform.
Medicare should do the same: create a contest open to anyone in the world who can beat its current risk-adjustment model...The winner should be able to use objective patient data to account for at least 45% of the spending variation caused by disease...
Lagniappe: Looks like WSJ is testing a new paywall strategy. Seems kind of cool