The Arkansas Innovation

Mention medical innovation, and you might think of the biotech corridor around Boston, or the profusion of companies developing wireless medical technologies in San Diego. But one of the most important hotbeds of new approaches to medicine is … you didn’t guess it: Arkansas.
The state has a vision for changing the way Arkansans pay for health care. It is moving toward ending “fee-for-service” payments, in which each procedure a patient undergoes for a single medical condition is billed separately. Instead, the costs of all the hospitalizations, office visits, tests and treatments will be rolled into one “episode-based” or “bundled” payment. “In three to five years,” John M. Selig, the head of Arkansas’s Department of Human Services, told me, “we aspire to have 90 to 95 percent of all our medical expenditures off fee-for-service.”

Arkansas House Panel Supports Bill for Autism Coverage

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- Speech therapist and behavior consultant Dayna Miller cried Tuesday as she told a silent group of Arkansas legislators about selling nearly everything she owned to get treatment for her autistic, 10-year-son.
Miller, who was a factory worker at the time, said her family sold possessions, took out loans and used her mother's savings. When they had used up everything they had, they learned to administer the behavioral treatment for her son Briar on their own.
Now, Briar speaks and reads clearly, plays golf and participates in a program for gifted children. Miller, 39, of Jonesboro, concluded her testimony in support of a bill that would require most health insurance plans to cover diagnosis and treatment for autism by bringing him in front of the committee.