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: RUC
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
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
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
Anti-RUC Suit Challenges Process for Setting Doc Pay Scales
Merrill Goozner Posted 10/25/11 on Gooz News Whither CMS? That’s the issue raised by Brian Klepper and David Kibbe in their post on the Health Affairs website this morning. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services faces a November deadline for answering a … 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
