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.
Pages
Category Archives: Payment Reform
Physicians, Health Systems and the Drive for Market Dominance
Brian Klepper Posted 5/23/13 on Medscape Connect’s Care & Cost Blog Several physicians have reached out recently to discuss attractive employment offers from health systems. They are invariably conflicted. They understand the trade-offs, that they’ll give up the autonomy they’ve become accustomed … 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
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
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
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
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
Demanding More From Medical Homes
Brian Klepper Published 9/4/12 in Medical Home News Never confuse motion with action. Benjamin Franklin A reporter called the other day to tell me that several local health systems now had medical homes. “I don’t think so,” I said. She was emphatic. … 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
The Most Powerful Health Care Group You’ve Never Heard Of
Brian Klepper and Paul Fischer Posted 8/06/12 on Medscape Connect’s Care and Cost Blog Excessive health care spending is overwhelming America’s economy, but the subtler truth is that this excess has been largely facilitated by subjugating primary care. A wealth of … 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
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
The RUC’s Empty Gesture
Brian Klepper and Paul M. Fischer Posted 5/11/12 on Medscape Internal Medicine Recently, the leaders of the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) lavished praise on the American Medical Association’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee … Continue reading
Moving Beyond Merchant Health Care
Brian Klepper Published 4/05/12 on MedPage Today Another luminary-rich panel has been formed to make recommendations about how physician and other healthcare services should be valued and paid for. The Society for General Internal Medicine launched the National Commission on Physician Payment Reform with funding from prominent … Continue reading
Should Family Physicians Leave the RUC?
Brian Klepper Posted 3/30/12 on KevinMD Last June the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) sent a letter to the AMA’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC) demanding specific changes to the ways that the RUC conducts its business. Primary … Continue reading
Creating Value-Based Incentives for Primary Care
Brian Klepper and David Kibbe Posted 6/2/11 on The Health Affairs Blog In a remarkable recent interview, Donald Berwick MD, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), eloquently described his vision of value-based health care. Paying for value … Continue reading
Rethinking the Value of Medical Services
Brian Klepper and David C. Kibbe First posted 8/1/11 on The Health Affairs Blog Copyright ©2011 Health Affairs by Project HOPE – The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc. One of American politics’ most disingenuous conceits is that health care must cost what … Continue reading
The AAFP’s Bold Valuation Initiative
Brian Klepper This morning, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the largest and “purest” of the major primary care societies – the American College of Physicians (ACP), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) are … Continue reading
