Financing and Payment Options for Care Coordination
I participated in a terrific meeting (June 3) sponsored by the National Coalition on Care Coordination (N3C) to brainstorm ideas about the smartest way to finance and pay for care coordination. Lots of bright and passionate people in the room responding to an excellent working draft paper on the subject authored by Robert Berenson, MD and Julianne Howell, PhD. For a summary of my suggestions on the subject, as a discussant at the meeting, check out the related HQP website page here.
The most important thing to understand is that THERE ARE proven interventions that work to improve health outcomes and lower cost among complex, chronically ill individuals, the availability of which we should begin to expand (with rigorous performance monitoring). We also must define our aims for such programs clearly and consistently, and dramatically increase our support for research in this area. CMS demonstrations have and will continue to be very important in this regard, but by themselves are not sufficient to accelerate innovation and R&D at a pace commensurate with the growing challenges faced by Medicare.
