- Today, Obama administration officials released a report summarizing progress of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) demonstration programs. The center has been working on 16 recent initiatives, funded with more than $1.7 billion in federal money and which will involve more than 50,000 providers over the next five years.
- CMMI Director Richard Gilfillan said the center will experiment with payment incentives and methods of delivering care within Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and it will also work with providers who see a large share of private patients.
- The vast number of Americans covered by Medicare and Medicaid suggests that changes embraced by doctors and hospitals serving those patients could be implemented system-wide.
- Gilfillan said the new initiatives will be rolled out soon. The center has $10 billion in total funding to spend through 2019. New initiatives will be discussed at an “innovation summit” being held by CMMI in Washington today with about 1,500 representatives from the health care and health technology fields.
- Some health care experts question whether the experiments will result in significant savings, pointing to a study released by the Congressional Budget Office last week that found that savings were produced in only one of 10 major Medicare demonstration projects tried by administrations since 1967.
- Robert Laszewski, a health care consultant, said it is still worth focusing on the key feature of the one experiment that did succeed: penalties for providers that did not produce savings.
- Several of the CMMI initiatives are focused on incentives, such as offering compensation to primary care providers to coordinate patients’ treatment and prevent them from developing costly illnesses. Others test accountable care organizations (ACOs) and new partnerships. The “Partnership for Patients” initiative will provide more than 7,100 organizations $500 million to help them reduce hospital-acquired conditions.
- At the summit today, Kaiser Permanente and the White House Office of National AIDS policy will announce an “HIV Challenge” that aims to reduce health disparities for people living with HIV by increasing access to HIV care and improving health outcomes using Kaiser’s clinical best practices, education materials, mentoring, training and health IT knowledge, Politico reports.
- The CMMI summit agenda can be found here. A press release issued today by the Department of Health and Human Services can be found here.
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