December 5, 2020
In a Health Affairs blog post yesterday morning, Donald Fisher and Chet Speed from AMGA took a hard look at some of the obstacles on the path to value-based care. Building off a survey of their membership and a close look at the Billings Clinic in Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas, they found that it’s often tough for practices to get the right data at the right time. They worry that commercial payers aren’t moving as aggressively toward value-based payments – especially in local markets. And they say that reporting requirements are too burdensome.
They’re taking a clear-eyed look at many of the challenges that primary care doctors are facing every day as we move to a health care system that rewards high-quality care. But if we look too hard at the obstacles, we can miss some opportunities.
Here’s what we’re seeing at Aledade:
Commercial Payers are Gearing Up for Value-Based Payment
https://aledade.com/moving-ahead-with-payment-reform-in-commercial-markets/
Commercial contracts around value-based payments aren’t everywhere just yet, but they’re on the move. Take this recent analysis from Leavitt Partners – Medicare may get the most attention, but a larger proportion of lives covered by an ACO come from commercial contracts, and they’re growing at a rapid pace.
Take two examples:
- Cigna established CareAllies, a service company that works with provider organizations of all types to improve patient outcomes and raise the quality and affordability of health care.
- Humana has a well-established value path called the Accountable Care Continuum that moves its Medicare Advantage providers away from fee for service towards global capitation.
Right here in Aledade, we’ve been working with commercial partners – like Highmark and Blue Cross Blue Shield, covering more than 70,000 lives, to connect them with high-quality care through the physicians in our ACOs.
This kind of movement across the market empowers purchasers as well. Now they’re empowered to push their payers towards value-based contracting.
Reporting Requirements Absolutely Need Standardization
https://aledade.com/the-importance-of-quality-measures-for-accountable-care/
Just as important as standardization is a shift in focus. We and our partner physicians must focus on getting value out of measurement. Asking ourselves the question “How can we use this measure in our practice to ensure better outcomes for our patients?” No doctor wants to be filling out multiple, confusing and often duplicative quality reporting requirements and there is a lot of work to do in standardization. However, we need to do our part and shift our mindset from compliance to outcomes.
Data Access is a Solvable Problem
https://aledade.com/aledade-gets-the-data-flowing-to-pcps/
Fisher and Speed focus on accessing data, but that’s only the first step. We agree that practices need to get the data. That’s why, at Aledade, we focus on connecting to HIEs to deliver data to practices. But practices then need to derive insights from that data. At Aledade, we developed an app that integrates all of a practices’ clinical and claims data, giving doctors a full picture of their patients’ care. And finally, practices need to act on the data, as it guides them to deliver high-quality, coordinated care.
As we grow, Aledade continues to develop relationships with stakeholders throughout the national and local health care markets to equip our ACOs with the data they need. A big part of this is working with Health Information Exchange networks (HIEs) in the communities our ACOs serve.
They can even partner with other practices. One idea that’s started to take shape here is the idea of a virtual group – a group of physicians who can band together online to improve the quality of their care, and be scored as a group for the purposes of the Merit-based Incentive Payment System under MACRA. Our experience has been that these efforts do benefit from the economies of scale and a data “utility” that serves virtual groups and physician practices is an idea whose time has come.
Aledade is here to navigate these obstacles
https://aledade.com/growing-together-and-learning-from-our-partner-physicians/
We agree that these obstacles are real. We hear about them from our own partner physicians every day. But they don’t necessarily need to slow our journey toward a value-based payment system. Everybody needs a partner in this era – and a key part of the transition to value is that partnership doesn’t have to be driven by ownership, but can be driven by shared values and centered around the patient.
Whether it is a partner like Aledade who is transitioning practices from volume to value right now or partners like the recently announced support for the Quality Payment Program who help practices get ready for the transition to value, practices are not in this alone.