In Washington, Democrats are contemplating ways to move health care reform forward in a filibuster-sensitive Congress and the White House is pivoting towards emphasizing job creation. Meanwhile, in the real world, Indiana and North Carolina are the site of two pilot projects that could have a significant impact on the quality and cost of medical care.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) announced earlier this week the launch of what Health Data Management describes as “the first large-scale Medicare study of a multi-payer, quality reporting and improvement, and pay-for performance program. Data from Medicare, Medicaid, private insurers and employer-sponsored health plans will be combined with clinical data to test if quality improvement and pay-for-performance programs are more effective in a multi-payer environment.”
In other words, the folks who operate Medicare are testing a method of moving from paying medical providers for what they do to a means of compensating providers for what they accomplish. At the same time the program will “provide participating physicians with better information on the patients they are treating,” according to a press release issued by the CMS. This demonstration project will take place in Indiana.
In North Carolina, meanwhile, CMS is working with a group to test ways of better coordinating care, implementing performance incentives and measuring the quality of care received by low-income Medicare beneficiaries. The test is for model termed “medical home,” which Health Management Data describes as “redesigned practices that are more functional and workflow-friendly” and that “focus on quality, safety and alternative reimbursement methods.” The model also requires extensive use of health information technologies (think e-prescribing, clinical decision support, and electronic health records.)
My background is in selling health insurance and the politics and substance of health care reform. So I may be misinterpreting the import of these pilot projects, but my take is that they are baby steps down a very significant path: constraining the cost of health care. Most significantly, they are being done by the Obama Administration without the need for further Congressional authorization, without the need for bridging partisan chasms, and without a lot of fuss or bother. The CMS is just doing what the CMS is supposed to do. Their authority? According to the CMS press release, the demonstrations are authorized by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003. No new or additional authority required.
Given the lack of fanfare and attention given to these efforts, this may or may not be a signal that President Barack Obama and his administration are launching a coordinated effort to implement meaningful health care reform on their own as I wrote about earlier this week. I’m not sure it matters, however. The key fact is that these experiments could identify methods of wringing savings from the current health care system without the political sausage making inherent in legislative undertakings. So even while health care reform is at a political standstill, the real work of reform seems to be moving forward.
That’s encouraging.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Health Care, Health Care Reform, Healthcare Reform, Politics Tagged: medical cost containment 
