August 30, 2018
Leavitt Partners, a Salt lake City-based healthcare consulting firm, hosted a conversation with Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator, Seema Verma, about value-based healthcare.
Here’s what we learned:
- Next Generation Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), which require physicians to take on almost complete financial risk, saved Medicare $62 million during their first year of operation.
- Despite a focus on tying payments for care to the quality of care provided and rewarding providers for efficiency and effectiveness, the fee-for-service model is not going away right now.
- To support Next Generation ACOs, the main goals are to promote accountability and competition, increase regulatory flexibility, which rewards providers for taking on substantial financial risk, and promote patient engagement with access to healthcare data as well as cost and quality information.
- The next step is to address the barriers to value-based care, including interoperability, meaningful measures (i.e., the quality measures that providers report), and supporting technology and communication innovation efforts.
- Support from the private sector is necessary in the long-term success of value-based care initiatives.