The Road to Value

This comes from an article in Modern Healthcare:

The shift to value-based payment stalled in 2017 largely because of decisions made by new CMS leadership and distractions caused by efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, health quality experts say.

And this is a bad thing?  Here’s more:

Over the last year, new CMS Administrator Seema Verma touted an agenda that supported value-based payment but also focused on ways to reduce administrative burden for clinicians. As a result, the Trump administration slowed down the implementation of Obama-era mandates intended to move the dial on value-based payment.

Move the dial?  That dial was going in an unproven direction.  Actually, it was going in a direction that was proven wrong.  Quality metrics and pay-for-performance have failed miserably.

Feel free to read the rest of the article but here is my favorite part:

Francois de Brantes, vice president and director of the Center for Payment Innovation at the Altarum Institute, said there currently aren’t many payment models for providers to try out.

“(Right now) we have two different flavors of advanced APMs. The vanilla flavor is the total cost of care, or ACOs, and the chocolate flavor is bundles, and that is it,” de Brantes said. “More flavors should be tried out. It is OK to innovate around payment because there all these different types of populations.”

What the hell does that even mean?

Forget flavors.  Forget payment innovation.  How about finding a transparent way for patients to pay for their care that inspires them to shop around and bring the price down? That’s the road to real value.

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