Home Health & Hospice Week

Innovation Center to focus on ‘scaling what works.’

If you thought Medicare might be talked into postponing the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing model’s nationwide expansion — maybe even indefinitely — a new essay from the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services makes that look unlikely.

HH VBP is one of six Innovation Center alternate payment models that has “generated statistically significant savings to taxpayers and Medicare,” notes a Health Affairs blog post by CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure and other top CMS officials. That’s out of 50 models CMS has tested.

Further, VBP is one of only four models that “have met the requirements to be expanded in duration and scope,” Brooks-LaSure points out.

In the future, CMS plans to scale back on the number of models it launches. “Testing too many models at once can create opposing, even conflicting incentives and burden model participants with figuring out the model hierarchies and interactions,” Brooks-LaSure notes. “Ultimately, this not only makes decisions about joining or continuing to participate in models difficult but also stymies systemic, scalable transformation.”

CMS also plans on “scaling what works to become a part of the core Medicare and Medicaid programs,” she pledges.

And the agency will make more model tests mandatory “because participants opt in when they believe they will benefit financially, and opt out (or never join) when they believe they are at risk for losses,” the essay notes.

See the post, which also discusses other strategic changes, at www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20210812.211558/full.