CMS Bundled Payments Director Shows Understanding of Hospital Issues

Submitted by jonpearce on Tue, 2011-10-04 10:28

In previous blog postings we’ve commented about the guidelines that CMS recently issued for the bundled payment initiative, noting that they were extremely flexible and gave the providers considerable leeway in proposing approaches to work together with physicians to achieve quality improvements and cost savings.   In a recent interview in Becker’s Hospital Review  CMS’s Valinda Rutledge, director of the Patient Care Models Group at CMS' Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, described CMS’s approach to the initiative.  Looking for broad, diverse participation, CMS designed different models that can be adapted to large health systems as well as small community hospitals.  They’re looking to create “a critical mass of innovative healthcare leaders so that care improvement becomes the new norm”, and to “remove the barriers that have historically hampered care improvement”.  These are laudable goals, and the guidelines actually seem to implement them in a way that will be attractive to participants.  The program expands the parameters of the Acute Care Episodes demonstration project by allowing more DRGs, a greater geographic distribution of participants, and higher gainsharing limits for sharing savings with physicians.  Rutledge, who was a former hospital CEO, hopes that hospitals will look on this demonstration as an opportunity for hospitals to “begin a partnership with CMS  towards care redesign”.

The application dates for participation in this program are rapidly approaching, so hospitals interested in participating should begin preparations now.  See Singletrack Analytics white paper on The Bundled Payment for Care Improvement Initiative.