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: Regulatory Capture
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
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
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
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
The Right Rx for Better Health Care: Rise Up to Challenge the Industry’s Lobbying Power
Brian Klepper and Shannon Brownlee Published 3/29/12 in the New York Daily News Obamacare had its days in the Supreme Court this week, and the justices’ decision could have sweeping consequences for the individual mandate provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable … Continue reading
Can Medical Management Succeed Within A Fee-For-Service Environment?
Brian Klepper The column immediately below is an important discussion by Douglas Elmendorf, the Director of the CBO – actually it was prepared by Lyle Nelson of CBO’s Health and Human Services Division, but it has Mr. Elmendorf’s imprimatur – … Continue reading
