“The healthcare industry has been forced to accept change. Nearly every speech, article and white paper by healthcare executives begins by acknowledging this. However, there is no precedent for the depth, range and complexity of change facing payers and providers at this time.”

So begins the first of a series of white papers on “Mastering Change: Succeeding in Healthcare’s New World Order,” by noted healthcare transformation expert Dr. Emad Rizk.

Get a copy of this new white paper to learn why rapid transformation has become an imperative, where it needs to start, and what innovations are creating a promising path forward. Dr. Rizk describes the conditions and strategies necessary for payers and providers to manage the pressures they face today while positioning themselves to thrive in an industry that will be transformed by advanced payment and care delivery models.

HIXs are around the corner. Health plans have been hard at work preparing for the January 1, 2014, health insurance exchange (HIX) launch date. In this new direct-to-consumer marketplace, plans must use price/premium and networks to successfully compete.

As the HIX landscape draws into sharper focus, you will clearly need:

• Market agility, particularly around provider networks, as HIX design and oversight will vary from state to state and best practices will continue to evolve.
• Process efficiency, as you’ll need to keep overall costs to keep premiums low.
• The ability to effectively manage medical costs, made particularly critical by challenges such as pent-up demand for healthcare services in previously uninsured populations, or membership churn between managed Medicaid and HIXs.

This reform insight shares how McKesson’s solutions can help health plans create targeted networks and keep premiums low, which will be critical success factors in a competitive marketplace. Read Competing Successfully in Health Insurance Exchanges [PDF].

Driven by healthcare reform and other changing market dynamics, stakeholders are at last getting down to the business of effecting true transformation. Actionable content — usable information that is understood, adopted and embedded into workflow — is a critical tool to enable that change. Get a practical overview of how to define, categorize and implement clinical content into your workflow. McKesson experts Dr. Jacqueline Mitus, Dr. Steve Silverstein and Matthew Zubiller explain the challenges and the best practices involved in building an actionable content framework to enable better decisions and better care.

Download the whitepaper now.

Helping patients stay out of the hospital once they’ve been discharged has been a longtime priority for many hospitals, health networks, and health plans. Now it has become a financial imperative too, thanks to provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. For the past six years, McKesson has researched and developed readmission reduction strategies as an integral part of care management strategy. Our approach focuses on the coordination of handoffs and aligns with the criteria endorsed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Project RED (Re-Engineered Discharge).

Read the white paper to learn more about developing a readmission reduction strategy.

In the past, preauthorization and other aspects of utilization management (UM) were effective in reducing inappropriate services and managing medical costs. However, traditional preauthorization lacks the speed, transparency and holistic approach necessary to maximize UM effectiveness. In this white paper, Matt Zubiller, vice president of Decision Management at McKesson Health Solutions, looks at the challenges health plans face with traditional authorization methods and describes both the components and the advantages of a prospective, exception-based approach.

Download the white paper here.