The Obama administration has succeeded in moving an estimated 30 percent of Medicare payments to new methods that reward doctors for quality of care instead of the volume of services they provide patients, officials announced Thursday.
The effort is part of a series of goals the administration laid out early last year to transform the way Medicare providers are paid so they’re incentivized to spend the time needed with patients and coordinate their care with other providers. Many believe the U.S. healthcare system currently lacks incentives for doctors and hospitals to offer their patients the best care and eliminate unnecessary and expensive services.
The Department of Health and Human Services used some new programs provided under Obamacare to transition payments over to the new models, including the Affordable Care Act’s Medicare Shared Savings Program and its Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
“Improving the quality and affordability of care for all Americans has always been a pillar of the Affordable Care Act, alongside expanding access to healthcare,” Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said Thursday afternoon. “The law gives us the tools to put patients at the center of their care, improve quality and help make care more affordable over the long term.”
Officials said the new payment methods will affect more than 10 million people currently enrolled in the Medicare program, most of them senior citizens.
The administration has created several types of quality-based payment models, including accountable care organizations (known as ACOs), advanced primary care medical homes and so-called bundled payments for episodes of care. Healthcare experts hope the models will help streamline care, eliminating duplicative medicare conversations, procedures or tests, the problem of lost medical charts and difficulties patients face in scheduling appointments.
When the administration announced its goal last year, officals set a deadline of the end of 2016 for switching 30 percent of Medicare payments to new models. But on Thursday they said they have beat that goal by completing the transition well ahead of schedule.
HHS said there 477 accountable care organizations are participating in Medicare. As of January, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimates that about $117 billion out of $380 billion traditional Medicare payments are tied to alternative payment models. Before the 2010 healthcare law, almost no Medicare payments were based on the new value-drive methods.
“We reached this goal in partnership with the thousands of providers who collaborated with us in innovation,” said CMS Chief Medical Officer Patrick Conway. “It’s in our common interest – as patients, providers, businesses, health plans, taxpayers — to build a healthcare delivery system that delivers better care, spends healthcare dollars more wisely and makes individuals and communities healthier.”
