I got a message today from Richard Citrin, a health and productivity management consultant, who was fresh from this week’s DMAA Care Continuum Alliance Conference. He called the event “excellent,” but did share that “there are some major issues around disease management, not the least is being whether or not DM actually works to improve health and reduce costs, despite common sense and significant research to the contrary.”
Then, he dropped this bombshell on me: “The elephant in the room news was that LifeMasters, a major carveout DM company, declared bankruptcy a few weeks based on the fact that they owe CMS $125 million for failure to achieve ‘guaranteed’ results from work with Medicare populations. The Congressional Budget Office has also reported that DM results may have minimal impact on health care costs.
