Resource Center
Saturday, March 01, 2003
New Hampshire Based, Non-Profit Health Insurance
From 1942 through the early seventies, New Hampshire Blue Cross and Blue Shield ruled the New Hampshire health insurance market. No other institution, then or now, has achieved such dominance nor is any company likely to do so in the future.
Then, from this lofty pinnacle of success the Blues fell to earth, landing before a judge of the New Hampshire Probate Court who, with a stroke of a pen, served public notice that the charitable mission of New Hampshire Blue Cross and Blue Shield was no longer sustainable. Thus, the court’s decision gave final approval to a transaction that enabled Anthem Insurance Company to acquire a New Hampshire icon while, at the same time, leaving behind a substantial endowment whose funds are dedicated to sustaining the goals and values of Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Recent Data on NH's Health Care System
Dr. Squires comments on the release of three new studies examining the cost of health care in New Hampshire and the financial stability of the state’s so called “safety net.”
Monday, March 16, 2009
Health System Reform
Health care represents 18% of the Gross Domestic Product. If left unchecked, health care could account for as much as one quarter of every dollar. The relationship between cost and quality of health care is clearly linked. Thirty percent or more of health care costs go to unneeded care or care that is wrong or delivered in the wrong setting (for instance, primary care in the ER). Conversely, more than half (about 55%) of recommended and necessary care is not provided at the right time. This is just one of many sobering statisics in this presentation that examines the possible options for health care reform in the United States.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Achieving Health Equity
The full presentation given by Dr. Anthony B. Iton on Social Determinants of Health at the Endowment for Health Annual Meeting.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
NH HealthWRQS: Health Risk Factors Online
County-level reports using the 2007 NH Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) are now available online at www.nhhealthwrqs.org. The reports include the most commonly requested health risk factors from the BRFSS, including smoking status, diabetes prevalence, alcohol consumption, obesity, and physical activity. With the addition of the 2007 reports, 2 sets of NH BRFSS reports are now available at the state and county level. The NH BRFSS is an annual health survey conducted as part of a national system of health surveys designed to monitor the prevalence of health conditions and behaviors related to the leading causes of death. The NH BRFSS is carried out by the NH Department of Health and Human Services with the support of, and in cooperation with, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The NH BRFSS has been a source of health related information for NH since 1987.
NH HealthWRQS is a web-based data analysis system that produces reports about common community health indicators. The NH HealthWRQS website includes information about the history and future of HealthWRQS, a menu-driven Report Library, a Report request function, and the ability to request access to the HealthWRQS system. The site was created through funding from the CDC Assessment Initiative.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
NH Hospital Scorecard
Assuring a cost-effective, quality health care system is one of the fundamental strategies of our work to “reduce economic barriers to health.” Although health care and hospital services are not something to “shop” for, we all need to know comparative quality and cost information about the health care institutions in our communities. The NH Hospital Scorecard is a way for employers and their employees to begin the conversation about the cost and quality of health care services in our state.
Originally incubated in the NH Citizens Health Initiative, the NH Purchasers Group on Health represents the public purchasers of health insurance for 120,000 state, university system, and school and municipal employees and their families.
New Hampshire Health Data Inventory
The Health Data Inventory contains health data sources and reports. The Health Data Inventory (HDI) provides useful information about these sources and links to organizations that manage the data. The HDI is not a warehouse of raw data.
The Health Data Inventory provides information about data sources including: links to the data sets and reports, the dates of the most recent data available, the geographic level of the analysis, and contact information for the office that stewards the data set and/or distributes the report.
Improving the Public's Health in New Hampshire
The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Public Health Services is working with partners throughout the state on a number of public health performance improvement and planning initiatives. The fundamental purpose and cumulative anticipated results of these efforts is to improve the public's health in New Hampshire.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Impact of Dependent Coverage for Health Insurance
HB 790 passed during the 2007 legislative session and expands the definition of dependent young adults to those who are under 26 years of age for purposes of increasing access to health insurance coverage. The New Hampshire Insurance Department has reviewed the impact of the initiative on coverage as well as cost.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Community Health Centers in New Hampshire
This report examines the financial performance and condition of eight community health centers in New Hampshire. It focuses on the key indicators of cash flow, profitability, liquidity, and capital structure. It describes key ratios and the variability of those ratios for purposes of trend and comparative analysis during the period 2003 - 2007.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Acute Care Nonprofit Hospitals in New Hampshire
This report examines the financial performance and condition of 23 acute care nonprofit hospitals in New Hampshire, culling from data over the five years comprising 2003 - 2007. This performance is compared to hospital performance in the northeast region and nationally and seeks to gain a deeper insight into where funds come from and where they go within the hospital sector.
Monday, January 07, 2008
A Pound of Prevention
The Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Policy Team of the New Hampshire Citizens Health Initiative has released its first report on health care in New Hampshire, “A Pound of Prevention.” This report utilizes the most current data available in 2006. The Citizens Health Initiative is a long term, broad-based coalition that brings together private citizens, businesses, medical providers, and community agencies to improve the health of New Hampshire’s citizens. The initiative has three major goals, each with a working group assigned to it:
- Promoting improved health and disease prevention
- Improving the quality of health care
- Promoting openness of information
This paper addresses the first goal – promoting improved health and disease prevention.
While New Hampshire is relatively healthy, not all the state’s citizens are equally healthy. Additionally, we are living longer. NH has the same health challenges and leading causes of death as the rest of the United States.
Many diseases are preventable which is why the policy team has recommended a focus on tobacco and alcohol, improved nutrition and physical activity, awareness of environmental influences, injury prevention and mental health services.
Stepping Up to the Future
The members of the Citizens Roundtable were called together by the Endowment for Health to look at the many challenges facing the health care system and make recommendations that would strengthen the health care system in New Hampshire.
Recommendations were made in several key areas including:
- Working together to keep the health care system stable;
- Ensuring that information is available to understand and make important decisions about our health care system;
- Understanding how well the health care system is working for NH’s citizens.
A new dynamic is at work in the health care system, brought on by a decline in employer-based coverage and a sustained increase in health care costs. We believe that together these forces create potentially destructive pressures on the system and may cause instability and the loss of providers essential to our community’s health.
In September 2004, the Endowment for Health charged the Citizens Roundtable to:
- Develop a common understanding of the causes and impacts of rising health care costs, expenditures, and insurance premiums, and Recommend actions to New Hampshire policy-makers (potentially with federal partners), employers, health care providers, and the general public that could meaningfully address rising costs, access, and quality.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
Telling Our Story: New Hampshire's Community Benefits
This report analyzes the first year's experience with the community benefits process created by legislative action in 1999 and offers recommendations for next steps including addressing system and infrastructure issues and disseminating information to the public. Health care providers, District Health Councils, community members, advocacy groups, foundations, legislators and health care charitable trusts have all been interested in the outcome of this legislation.
Working Together to Assure a Healthy Public
This is a comprehensive document that provides information on the health status of the residents of New Hampshire. The purpose of this report is to increase awareness of a variety of health topics in New Hampshire and serve as a tool to guide decision-making for policymakers, health care providers, public health workers, practitioners, educators, and social service agencies.
The New Hampshire State Health Report looks at health from an overarching perspective of what influences individual and community health. This approach redirects the reader from looking solely at the result of disease, to focus on the potential for improving health.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Fulfilling the Promise: Transforming NH's Mental Health System
In the past 10 years, admissions to the state's public psychiatric hospital have doubled. Local communities have seen reductions in psychiatric hospital units, group homes that provide residential treatment, and intensive outpatient services. Per capita expenditures at hte state's mental health centers have been reduced by nearly half. Primary care providers have seen significant increases in mental health issues in their medical settings. The rate of incarceration for people with mental health issues has risen. To address these issues, New Hampshire's legislature created the Commission to Develop a Comprehensive State Mental Health Plan in 2005. This report outlines the Commission's recommendations to improve the system of mental health care in the state.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Driving the Economy
The cost of personal health care is rising in New Hampshire. In the Granite State, personal health care, which includes visits to doctors, hospitalizations, medicine, and so on, consumes 18 percent of our economy, or 18 cents of every dollar. In 2007, that amounted to $10.6 billion. Twenty years ago, spending on personal health care was less than 10 percent of New Hampshire's economy. Twenty years from now, health care spending is projected to reach nearly 22 to 25 percent of economic activity.
Perhaps most striking in this analysis is the degree to which healthcare plays an even larger role in the economic landscape in New Hampshire. Hospitals are often the single largest employer in the labor market areas across New Hampshire. More generally, the health and social services industries account for a significant share of economic activity -- as measured by wages -- particularly in rural areas of the state.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Driving Health Care Premiums: Cost-Shifting in New Hampshire
In an environment in which the public payers – which account for almost 50 percent of health care expenditures – pay less than the costs of services and some of the uninsured are provided services through hospital-based charitable care, the hospital industry has to find ways to support patient care services. One way of financing these deficits has been through allocation of unrecovered costs of one patient population to above-cost revenue collected from other patient populations – largely the privately insured. This phenomenon is called ‘cost-shifting.’ Hospitals also generate positive operating margins. Operating margins are the share of revenues for patient care services that exceed expenses for providing that care.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
NH Public Mental Health Consumer Survey
During 2008, the Institute on Disability, the UNH Survey Center, the Bureau of Behavioral Health, and New Hampshire's 10 regional Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs) collaborated on a unique project to learn consumer perspectives on the quality of mental health services received. The results from the survey provide the best statewide consumer perspective to date on the quality and effectiveness of New Hampshire's community mental health service system.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Community Mental Health Centers in New Hampshire
This report analyzes the six-year financial history and current financial condition of the ten community mental health centers currently serving close to 50,000 mental health clients in the State of New Hampshire. Medicaid payments account for approximately 75% of total revenue sources (including grants and contracts as well as patient service revenues) and roughly 85% of patient service revenue alone. Most centers do not have sufficient financial reserves to fund substantial operating losses. Future Medicaid cuts could result in a marked reduction in services, affecting more than 3,000 people.
Wednesday, January 01, 2003
2003 Health Insurance Survey
The 2003 New Hampshire Health Insurance Survey was conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center in September 2003. The survey was sponsored by the New Hampshire Endowment for Health and the HNHfoundation.
The main purposes for the survey included:
- To estimate incidence of health insurance and uninsurance in New Hampshire;
- To understand who is uninsured and why, and;
- To determine the attitudes of New Hampshire residents toward reform of the health insurance system in the state.
Saturday, December 01, 2007
New Hampshire's Healthcare Dashboard
This paper introduces the findings of a new healthcare dashboard designed to assess different aspects of the performance of the healthcare system in New Hampshire. In collaboration with a workgroup of participants in the Citizen's Health Initiative, the Center developed a set of indicators designed to assess and monitor key dimensions of the healthcare system in New Hampshire. The key dimensions are cost, the healthcare infrastructure, access to services, the quality of care and the public's money.
Health Care Finance
The NH Center for Public Policy Studies has been conducting research under grants from the Endowment for Health. This research focuses on public polices and private practices that affect the cost of health care, where it is provided, who gets it, and who pays for it. The ultimate goal of the project is to identify policies and practices that would maintain or enhance every resident’s ability to obtain quality health care at a reasonable price.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Addressing the Critical Mental Health Needs of NH's Citizens
Health and Human Services Commissioner Nicholas Toumpas supported a convening of a task force to assess the current status of publicly funded mental health services and to make recommendations regarding additional services and supports that are critical to meeting the needs of New Hampshire's Citizens.
Among the recommendations are increased availability of community residential supports, increased capacity for community-based inpatient psychiatric are, Assertive Community Treatment teams, community mental health workforce retention and development and a Department of Corrections study committee.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
New Hampshire's Public Health Improvement Action Plan
This action plan outlines the definition of public health, discusses national public health performance standards and talks about the pulse of our state public health system. It also outlines the essential services and sets public health strategic priorities for the state.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Rural Integrative Care Planning in Sullivan County
The term Integrated Primary Care describes a clinical practice that integrates behavioral and medical health services within a primary healthcare setting...Rural areas, confronted with economic, geographic, and cultural barriers, face unique and significant challenges providing adequate mental health care...Behavioral health interventions hold promise for improving the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders in the primary care setting, with strong evidence of effectiveness in improving patients' physical and mental health status.
