CMS BLOG: Medicare’s investment in primary care shows progress

CMS BLOG
http://blog.cms.gov/2016/10/17/medicares-investment-in-primary-care-shows-progress

October 17, 2016
By Dr. Patrick Conway, CMS Principal Deputy Administrator and Chief Medical Officer

Medicare’s investment in primary care shows progress

Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) initiative’s second round of shared savings results, with nearly all practices (95 percent) meeting quality of care requirements and four out of seven regions sharing in savings with CMS. These results reflect the work of 481 practices that served over 376,000 Medicare beneficiaries and more than 2.7 million patients overall in 2015.

As the largest test of advanced primary care in U.S. history, CPC demonstrates the potential of primary care clinicians redesigning their practices to deliver better care to their patients, and provides clinicians support to innovate and deliver care in ways that better meet their patients’ needs and preferences.

During 2015, its second shared savings performance year, CPC generated a total of $57.7 million gross savings in Part A and Part B expenditures. These savings are essentially equivalent to the $58 million paid in care management fees to the practices. Four of the seven regions participating in CPC – the states of Arkansas, Colorado, and Oregon, and the Greater Tulsa region in Oklahoma – realized net savings (after accounting for the care management fees paid) and will share in those savings with CMS. Although three of the CPC regions had net losses, the savings generated in the other four regions covered those losses, such that care management fees across CPC were offset by reduced spending on Medicare Part A and Part B services. Further, more than half of participating CPC practices will receive a share of over $13 million in earned shared savings.

In addition to the gross Medicare savings, CPC practices showed positive quality, with lower than expected hospital admission and readmission rates, and favorable performance on patient experience measures. CPC practices’ performance on electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs) also exceeded national benchmarks, particularly on preventive health measures.

This is the first year CMS has included eCQM performance in Medicare shared savings determinations for CPC. eCQM reporting covering the entire practice population at the practice site level is critical to using health information technology as a tool to support care delivery transformation. eCQM data are recorded in the electronic health record in the routine course of clinical care, allowing practices to engage in real time quality improvement efforts that drive population health. As we move to a health care system that rewards value over volume, CPC practices are at the forefront of using eCQMs for quality improvement, measurement, and reporting.

Quality highlights from the 2015 shared savings performance year include:

• 97 percent of CPC practices successfully reported 9 eCQMs. For ten out of the eleven eCQMs in the CPC measure set, the majority of CPC practices who reported surpassed the median national performance.
• Nearly all (99 percent) practices reported higher levels of colorectal cancer screening and influenza immunization compared to national benchmarks. Additionally, 100 percent of practices who reported on screening for clinical depression surpassed national benchmarks.
• Compared to 2014, most regions maintained or improved their scores on hospital readmissions and admissions for chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and congestive heart failure.
• Patients rated the care they receive from their CPC practitioners highly, particularly on how well practitioners supported them in taking care of their own health and the attention they paid to care from other providers.

The positive performance is a testament to the efforts CPC practices have made to provide truly “comprehensive primary care.”

CPC is a multi-payer partnership launched by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (Innovation Center) in October 2012 to advance primary care by paying clinicians to deliver accessible, comprehensive, and coordinated care in seven regions across the country. CPC supports advanced primary care as the foundation of our health system. In addition to attending to patients’ acute, chronic, and preventive health care needs, primary care practices act as the quarterback of each patient’s health care team. CPC practices help patients navigate their care, communicate with specialists and hospitals, and ensure that patients with complex social and medical needs do not “fall through the cracks” of the health care system.

These results build on the first shared savings performance year in 2014. Gross savings nearly doubled from the first performance year to the second and practices in four regions were eligible to receive shared savings, compared to one region in 2014. Primary care transformation takes time, and it is especially encouraging that CPC practices maintained such positive quality of care results while also seeing gross Medicare savings in the 2015 performance year.

The experience in CPC has contributed to our continued efforts to support primary care going forward in the Innovation Center’s Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+), which will begin on January 1, 2017 and for which we recently announced the 14 selected regions and are currently reviewing practice applications. CMS anticipates that CPC+ could meet the criteria to qualify as an Advanced Alternative Payment Model (Advanced APM) under the recently finalized Quality Payment Program rule, which implements the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. A robust primary care system is essential to achieve better care, smarter spending, and healthier people. For this reason, CMS is committed to supporting primary care clinicians to deliver the best, most comprehensive primary care possible for their patients.