Brian Klepper
is a health care analyst and commentator, Principal and Chief Development Officer for WeCare TLC, LLC, an onsite primary care clinic and medical management firm based in Longwood, FL, and Managing Principal of Healthcare Performance Inc., a consulting practice based in Atlantic Beach, FL.
He is an active author and speaker, and has provided health care commentary to CBS Evening News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. He has published articles on Kaiser Health News, Medscape, Healthleaders, The New England Journal of Medicine, Modern Healthcare, Business Insurance and newspapers nationally.
He is a columnist for Medscape, focused on business of medicine and primary care, as well as a regular contributor to the Health Affairs Blog and other expert health care blogs. With his wife, he maintains Elaine’s Journey, which details their struggle against Primary Peritoneal (Ovarian) Cancer.
He recently served on the American Academy of Family Physicians’ Primary Care Services Valuation Task Force, and is a reviewer for Health Affairs and The Journal of Ambulatory Care Management. He serves on the Board of the Consortium for Southeast Hypertension Control (COSEHC), dedicated to translational medicine for vascular disease. He is an Advisor to the Lundberg Institute, the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, which advocates for medical homes, and the Center for Value Health Innovation, which helps business identify and implement approaches proven to improve quality while reducing cost.
In January 2011, with David C. Kibbe MD, he began a campaign, Replace the RUC!, that focuses on the most important driver of inappropriate health care cost. That effort has resulted in a lawsuit by six Augusta, GA primary care physicians against the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) over its longstanding inappropriate relationship with the AMA’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC).
In is spare time, Brian is an offshore sailor.
Contact him at 904.395.5530 (o), 904.343.2921 (c), bklepper@gmail.com.
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Category Archives: Brian Klepper
Using Strong Carrots and Sticks To Drive Health Care That Works
Brian Klepper Posted 5/09/13 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog On a recent call with a large manufacturer, my company’s team expected to describe how we develop primary care medical homes that become platforms for managing comprehensive health care clinical and financial risk. But … Continue reading
Why Aren’t Primary Care Physicians More Ticked off about the RUC? An Interview with Brian Klepper
Brandon Glenn Published 4/30/13 in Medical Economics If primary care physicians have a bigger enemy than the RUC, Brian Klepper, PhD, hasn’t heard about it. The American Medical Association’s (AMA) Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC) is a 31-physician panel that wields enormous influence with … Continue reading
How Physician Practices Can Prepare for a Health Care Marketplace
Brian Klepper Posted 4/21/13 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost Blog What is the path forward for physicians who want to remain in private practice, outside the constraints of health system employment? How will the environment change and what new demands will … Continue reading
Seriously Testing the Waters
Brian Klepper Published April 2013 in Accountable Care News If necessity is the mother of invention, then tentativeness and ambiguity are the parents of procrastination. In health care, fee-for-service remains the dominant paradigm, so the ACO movement, lacking almost any semblance of … Continue reading
When Employers Get Serious About Managing Health Care Risk
Brian Klepper Posted 4/07/13 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog Last week I visited with Gary Rost, an unassumingly knowledgeable man and the Executive Director of the Savannah Business Group (SBG), arguably one of the most effective health care coalitions in the … Continue reading
Why EHRs Really Haven’t Made Us Healthier: A Response To Glen Tullman
Brian Klepper Recently-fired Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman waxed progressive in a self-promotional Forbes article last week, describing the ways past and forward for electronic health records (EHRs) and health information technology (HIT). He may have been trying to recover from a damning New York … Continue reading
Truth at the End of Life
Elaine Waples Posted 3/5/13 on TEDMED Most of us have spent some time thinking about our own deaths. We do it with a sense of dreadful curiosity, but then we push it aside with “well, we’ve all got to go sometime.” Unlike … Continue reading
A Broader Approach To Managing Health Care Risk
Brian Klepper Health care’s purchasers crave certainty. But complexity – and therefore uncertainty – rules. Assurances are hard to come by. The most common question asked by prospective clients of my onsite clinic/medical management firm is how much less their employee health … Continue reading
The RUC, Health Care Finance’s Star Chamber, Remains Untouchable
Brian Klepper Posted 2/1/13 on The Health Affairs Blog On January 7, a federal appeals court rejected six Georgia primary care physicians’ (PCPs) challenge to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) 20-year, sole-source relationship with the secretive, specialist-dominated … Continue reading
Them, Not Us
Brian Klepper Posted 1/7/13 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost Blog “How many businesses do you know that want to cut their revenue in half? That’s why the healthcare system won’t change the healthcare system.” Rick Scott, Governor of Florida Former CEO, Hospital … Continue reading
An Archipelago of Health Information Islands
Brian Klepper Posted 12/27/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost Blog My wife Elaine was hospitalized for 6 days recently with an array of ailments related to her advancing cancer, so diagnosing and addressing her problems required a multidisciplinary approach. In addition … Continue reading
When Employers Collaborate To Manage Health Care Costs
Brian Klepper Published 12/09/12 in the Eau Claire, WI Leader-Telegram Note from Brian: This piece appeared last weekend in the Eau Claire, WI newspaper, and was written with the encouragement of employers in that community who, rightly, believe they’ve been raked over the … Continue reading
Following the Money
Brian Klepper Posted 12/06/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog On The Health Care Blog, veteran analyst Vince Kuraitis reviews a report from the consulting firm Oliver Wyman (OW), arguing that the trend toward reconfiguring health systems to deliver more accountable care is more … Continue reading
How Primary Care Became The Job Nobody Wanted (And How To Fix It)
Brian Klepper Posted 11/21/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog Here a link on SlideServe to my plenary presentation on CMS’ relationship with the AMA’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC), and how/why it has undermined American primary care. I delivered this … Continue reading
Arriving at the Beginning
Brian Klepper Posted 11/12/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog The most striking aspect of the election was that it decisively clarified the philosophical preferences of most Americans. And because the outcome was largely determined by minorities, women, and the young, … Continue reading
Irresistible Forces
Brian Klepper Posted 10/28/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog At our first meeting years ago, Tom Emerick, Walmart’s then VP of Global Benefits, told me, “No industry can grow indefinitely at a multiple of general inflation. It will eventually become … Continue reading
Walmart Moves Health Care Forward Again
Brian Klepper Posted 10/12/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog Walmart’s sheer size makes almost any of their initiatives newsworthy. That said, despite being a lightning rod for criticism on employee benefits and health care, they have introduced initiatives with far-reaching impacts. … Continue reading
Are You Ready for Intense Price Competition?
Note from Brian: The article below describes my recent keynote address to a large meeting of imaging center administrators, and appears in the Sept 2012 Radiology Today. I’m reposting it because it accurately reflects, in depth, the message that I … Continue reading
The Wrong Battles
Brian Klepper Posted 9/20/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost Blog This week the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) issued a new report describing its vision of primary care’s future. Not surprisingly, the report talks about medical homes, with patient-centered, team-based care. More … Continue reading
Primary Care’s Dilemma
Brian Klepper Posted 9/12/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost Blog Early in the new documentary, Escape Fire, which provides detailed portraits of US health care’s craziness, we meet Erin Martin MD, a young primary care physician in The Dalles, OR, … Continue reading
Business Leaders Have A Chance To Step Up and Fix Health Care
Brian Klepper and Tom Emerick Published in abbreviated form 8/14/12 in Workforce Management Independent of whether the Affordable Care Act remains, public and private purchasers are unlikely to see meaningful health care cost reductions from policy w the near future. Our … Continue reading
Why Medical Management Will Re-Emerge
Brian Klepper Posted 7/31/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost Several years ago I had dinner with a woman who had served in the late 1990s as the national Chief Medical Officer of a major health plan. At the time, she said, … Continue reading
Is Genomic Medicine Clinically Useful Yet?
Brian Klepper Posted 7/16/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost The news of my wife Elaine’s primary peritoneal cancer 27 months ago began a fevered effort to learn all we could about her disease and our options. Peritoneal cancer, which … Continue reading
Will Anyone Listen When Former CMS Chiefs Call For More Objective Physician Payment?
Brian Klepper Posted 7/7/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost On May 10th, the US Senate Finance Committee, co-chaired by Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), convened a remarkable panel of four former Administrators of the Health Care … Continue reading
Cancer Survivor on N-of-One’s Direct-to-Patient Ombudsman Model
Kevin Davies Posted 5/31/12 on Bio-IT World The long-term success of N-of-One, a Waltham Mass.-based company offering personalized cancer information, will undoubtedly be shaped by the vision of its newly appointed CEO, Christine Cournoyer, and strategic partnerships with companies like Foundation Medicine, … Continue reading
Medicare Physician Payment: A Hollow Victory for the RUC
Brian Klepper Posted 5/18/12 on The Health Affairs Blog Copyright 2012 by Project HOPE: The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc. On May 9th, William Nickerson, Senior Judge in the Southern Maryland Federal District Court, issued a 15 page ruling against the six Augusta, … Continue reading
The American College of Physicians’ Cognitive Dissonance
Brian Klepper Relative to their specialist colleagues, primary care physicians have been generally passive about the politics that shape their professional lives, and they have been big losers. It is important for them to consider whether their societies are genuinely … Continue reading
