The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare

The new Innovation Center Models

The new Innovation Center Models have been finalized by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. The key goal is to continue the administration’s success toward shifting Medicare payments away from rewarding quantity delivered. It aims to reward quality by creating significant incentives for health care institutions to change patient care while lowering costs. The models are meant to reward health care organizations who collaborate with physicians and other providers to decrease problems, improve recovery time, and avoid hospital readmissions (\“2016-12-20 - Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services\”, 2016). The new model comes with new policies which improve cardiac care through new payment models that support clinicians in the provision of care to those patients that receive treatment for heart attacks. There is the improved orthopedic care through the new payment model that is intended to support the clinicians in offering care to those patients that receive surgery due to hip fracture other than administering hip replacement (\“2016-12-20 - Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services\”, 2016).

Financial implications of the reforms

In conjunction with the restructured Comprehensive Care for the Joint Replacement Model, the compensation approaches offer the clinicians more chances of qualifying for the 5 percent incentive payment via the Advanced Alternative Payment Model path. The financial implications of the reforms are that there will be reduced medical expenses on the side of the patients and the health care personnel will earn more money in terms of the incentive payments. In a bid to promote reward for quality, there will be the establishment of a composite quality score. The score will be on the grounds of the organizational quality performance as compared to other health care organizations. This approach will enable the hospitals achieving high-quality performances to have higher chances to qualify for the financial incentives within the new models (\“2016-12-20 - Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services\”, 2016).

Reference

2016-12-20 - Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (2016). Cms.gov. Retrieved 16 January 2017, from https://www.cms.gov/Newsroom/MediaReleaseDatabase/Fact-sheets/2016-Fact-sheets-items/2016-12-20.html