Beneath the ideological crossfire and mostly bluster of the ACA ‘repeal and replace crowd’, while the latest ‘new, new, thing‘ aka the defacto Rorschach upside of a litany of mostly vaporware or me too ‘meh‘ digital health apps, platforms or S-1 filings (see: ‘Disruptive Idiots from Silicon Valley‘) stumble into maturity amidst growing calls for validation and evidence of tangible ecosystem sustainability, a pulse of innovation can be found in some less ‘sexy’ sectors.
Some time ago physician innovation pioneer Richard Merkin, MD, the founder and principal visionary behind the Heritage Provider Network and all of its sequelae (Heritage Medical Systems, Heritage ACO, etc.), opined from the stage at the ACO Summit that perhaps the biggest contribution (“gold“) from the ACA was to be mined from the forward leaning work stimulated by the law’s enablement of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) aka @CMSinnovates on twitter.
The indisputable driver of what was then invested in Richard Gillfilan, MD the first CMMI Director (now stewarding the transformation at Trinity Health System, @TrinityHealthMI), was the volume to value imperative.
Into this challenge was cast considerable public capital/incentive funds to model what that meant from a delivery system and financing re-engineering perspective. Perhaps fueling the discounting of CMMI’s early efforts was the poorly constructed ‘Pioneer ACO‘ program, ostensibly designed to attract a more risk savvy pool of players who could reasonably assume greater risk and therefore earn more meaningful bonuses for doing what they already know how to do principally via Medicare Advantage participation. This early cohort of 32 ‘Pioneers’ has dwindled recently to 19 with the recent defection of the trophy Darmouth-Hitchcock ACO, see: ‘Dartmouth-Hitchcock exits Medicare’s Pioneer ACO program‘.
With that as backdrop, consider the following timely guide from the Cooperative of American Physicians titled ‘The Physician’s Guide To Value-Based Compensation‘. Consider this an essential ‘blocking and tackling’ primer of how to incentivize the granular behavior of those who write the ‘purchase orders’ for an essentially supply driven healthcare economy. As my colleague and surfing buddy John Mattison, MD (@JohneMattison), Assistant Medical Director, and CMIO Kaiser Permanente Southern California (@KPshare) often says: ‘we get what we incent’.
[Editor’s Note: and for those of you really interested in where the AMA stands on the bridging the volume-to-value divide, listen to: Health 2.0 Fall Conference 2015: An AMA Deep Dive on ‘The App Cure’].
Whether the ACA is repealed (highly doubtful) or materially modified (also not likely) its essence will not and cannot be ‘undone’ – the horse is out of the barn. Like it or not, the controlling DNA driving the many moving parts articulated in the ACA (and its state lab version ‘RomneyCare’) builds on decades of established health policy thinking on what works in the uniquely American public/private pluralistic partnership of healthcare financing and delivery.
Watch the ‘enablers’
Whether ACOs, fully integrated delivery systems (real IDNs – NOT their IDN lite versions), PCMHs, or one of a number of strains of risk bearing organizations (RBOs) from bundled pricing to full blown per member per month (PMPM) capitation, this is where the sustainable action can and will be found. This other stuff, plays well at CES and the many wannabe healthcare industry copy cat conferences playing an up the ante ‘cool factor’ card to an often ADD crowd, yet it’s tangible contribution to the triple aim or sustainable healthcare economy remains squarely ‘on the come.‘
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