Through a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service initiative, states are encouraged to revamp their healthcare delivery systems and improve their care while lowering costs.
So far, 17 states have received a total of nearly $1 billion in funding, according to an analysis recently published in JAMA that evaluated the CMS State Innovation Model. They have all developed plans to make at least 80 percent of their payments based on value-based reimbursement instead of fee-for-service.
In April 2012, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon and Vermont were selected to participate. In December 2014, CMS selected 11 more states: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Washington.
States are required to integrate public health, community-based and behavioral health services, develop a population health plan and focus on workforce development plans, health IT improvements and data analytics.
The authors mentioned that CMS would provide an evaluation of the State Innovation Model at the program’s conclusion.
“It remains critical to closely monitor patient and population health outcomes because evidence-based health system delivery interventions can sometimes produce unanticipated results when implemented in different health ecosystems,” the authors wrote. “Nevertheless, states are rich learning laboratories for one another in how they design and implement delivery, payment, technology, and population health innovations. States are already demonstrating that transformation is possible when multiple stakeholders—including payers and clinicians—are working together and actively engaged.”
Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.