Home Health & Hospice Week

Return on investment matters when it comes to pay reform models, CMMI indicates.

Curious about whether - and when - CMS will take Home Health Value-Based Purchasing nationwide? You may get a few clues in a new federal report on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which runs VBP.

Innovation Center officials told the Government Accountability Office that it "recently developed a methodology to estimate a forecasted return on investment for its model portfolio," the GAO says in a new report, "Model Implementation and Center Performance." The center is "in the early stages of refining the methodology and applying it broadly across its models," the GAO adds.

However, CMMI also told the GAO that it "plans to continue focusing on the use of voluntary participation models and to develop models in new areas, including prescription drugs, Medicare Advantage, mental and behavioral health, and program integrity."

Reminder: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' VBP model is running in nine states until 2022.

Eighty-one HHAs have participated in the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) Model 3, Retrospective Post-Acute Care Only, the GAO adds. That model "tests the effectiveness of a payment arrangement in which post-acute care providers ... or physician group practices receive payments or make recoupment payments if total costs for certain Medicare services are over or under a predetermined target price," the GAO recaps. "These services are those provided during a clinical episode that begins with post-acute care services and include all services up to 90 days after the hospital discharge that preceded the post-acute care services."

See the report at www.gao.gov/assets/700/690875.pdf.