CMS Creates Fund To Seed State-Based Medicaid Innovation
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
New resources improve states’ abilities to advance Medicaid payment and delivery system reform.
HHS Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell has announced a new innovative collaboration with states designed to improve care for Medicaid beneficiaries by accelerating reforms of their healthcare, improving care while reducing costs. The goals and activities of the Medicaid Innovation Accelerator Program build on many of the recent recommendations made by the National Governors Association’s (NGA) Health Care Sustainability Task Force.
Through the Medicaid Innovation Accelerator Program, HHS is investing over $100 million in technical support to help states in their efforts to improve health, improve care and decrease costs for their Medicaid beneficiaries.
The funds are part of an endeavor intended to identify and replicate ways to provide Medicaid beneficiaries with better care at lower costs. States can tap into the funds to strengthen their capabilities in technical areas such as data analytics, service delivery, financial modeling and quality measurement. Those endeavors, the CMS hopes, will give other states enough information to see what works and blueprints they can copy.
“Medicaid innovation is moving forward, and the new Medicaid Innovation Accelerator Program, announced in response to recommendations from Governors, will give states the opportunity to even further strengthen their great work,” said Secretary Burwell. “HHS will provide strategically targeted resources that states can leverage to enhance the impact of their efforts to transform health care.”
Most of the federal government's recent attempts to overhaul healthcare payment and delivery methods have focused on Medicare. The IAP reflects an increasing shift of the agency's attention toward Medicaid.
In a July 14 letter to states, the CMS outlined several current endeavors that officials identified as steps in the right direction. For instance, in 2008, North Carolina implemented a transitional-care program that provided comprehensive medication management and face-to-face self-management education for beneficiaries with multiple chronic conditions who were recently hospitalized. The patients in the program have had 20 percent fewer readmissions than similar patients.
Nationwide, while Medicaid spending overall has grown as more people have gained coverage, initiatives such as North Carolina's have helped per enrollee spending decline by 1.2 percent – from $6,768 to $6,641 – in 2012, according to the CMS.
“We are very pleased by this new effort to develop performance partnerships with states that can deliver better health outcomes at a cost we can afford,” said Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber. “Using the reform principles developed by a bipartisan NGA Health Care Sustainability Task Force that I co-chaired with Governor Haslam, Oregon has begun to prove these principles can deliver. We look forward to working with HHS, NGA and other states to scale this work.”
The Medicaid Innovation Accelerator Program will develop Medicaid specific resources to support state-based innovative health care reform efforts by identifying and advancing new Medicaid service delivery and financing models to improve patient care by providing data analytics, improving quality measurement and rapid cycle evaluation capabilities, and advancing effective and timely dissemination of best practices and learning among states.
However, some remain pessimistic about the project. Robert Kaestner, a research associate for the conservative-leaning National Bureau of Economic Research, said the CMS is setting up the project for failure by choosing which efforts to back. “It is a way to dole out money to states so that feds can say they are working with states to innovate,” Kaestner said. “It will have virtually no effect on Medicaid program in terms of cost and quality.”
For more information on the Medicaid Innovation Accelerator Program, click here.