AHA White Paper on Bundled Payment Released

Submitted by jonpearce on Mon, 2012-11-05 11:36

The American Hospital Association recently released its white paper analyzing the Medicare bundled payment initiative, as well as other bundled payment issues. Entitled "Medicare Payment Bundling: Insights from Claims Data and Policy Implications" and prepared by Dobson | DeVanzo, it explores many of the issues surrounding bundled payment, including episode definitions, pricing, managing patients under bundled payment system, and other similar issues. In addition to analyzing a payment system similar to the BPCI (it did not exactly duplicate the calculations of the BPCI), it presents four different simulation scenarios using regression analysis based on patient characteristics, which the paper concludes may provide more accurate estimation of actual provider cost of treating these patients.

The paper also presents an extensive appendix showing analyses derived from its bundled payment models, including differences in episode costs by teaching status, urban rural status, bedsize, DSH payment percentage and other similar factors. For organizations without access to their own bundled payment data, this information provides some basic statistics that are valuable in understanding how bundled payment systems work.