The board, part of the Institute of Medicine, especially appealed to physicians to stay abreast of fast-paced changes in cancer care. The board noted that patients who undergo more complicated treatments at high-volume cancer centers survive at rates two to three times higher than others. Despite its purported advantages, disease management can be a hard sell to some physicians. One skeptical MD is Toby Gropen, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based neurologist who runs the stroke unit at his hospital. Gropen says he's still somewhat suspicious of the motives driving disease management and will not completely embrace any practice guidelines whose source or authorship is unclear.
Guidelines are all over the place.
I don't think payers, for example, are necessarily factoring in all the patient-related issues that may be influencing length of stay, for instance. My perspective is that we should look at the evidence ourselves and make our own interpretations. My own judgment. Physicians who are skeptical of disease-management programs, and perhaps managed care in general, need to give their health systems a chance to prove themselves, says UnitedHealth's Newcomer. UnitedHealth Group does this by demonstrating its financial commitment to making disease management work in a manner that also helps out its plan's physicians.