The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that it has released the comments submitted by patients, clinicians, innovators, and others in response to the CMS Innovation Center’s New Direction Request for Information (RFI).
Last fall, CMS released the RFI to collect ideas on a new direction for the agency’s Innovation Center to promote patient-centered care and test market driven reforms that: Empower beneficiaries as consumers, provide price transparency, increase choices and competition to drive quality, reduce costs, and improve outcomes.
The Innovation Center is a central focus of the Administration’s efforts to accelerate the move from a healthcare system that pays for volume to one that pays for value and encourages provider innovation.
Since the RFI comment period closed last November, CMS has been reviewing the responses, which provided valuable insight on the potential to improve existing models as well as ideas for transformative new models that aim to empower patients with more choices and better health outcomes.
The responses focused on a number of areas that are critical to enhancing quality of care for beneficiaries and decreasing unnecessary cost, such as increased physician accountability for patient outcomes, improved patient choice and transparency, realigned incentives for the benefit of the patient, and a focus on chronically ill patients.
In addition to the themes that emerged around the RFI’s guiding principles and eight model focus areas, the comments received in response to the RFI also reflected broad support for reducing burdensome requirements and unnecessary regulations.
CMS is also taking a next step to develop a potential model in the area of direct provider contracting, informed in part by the RFI. A direct provider contract model would allow providers to take further accountability for the cost and quality of a designated population in order to drive better beneficiary outcomes.
Such a model would have the potential to enhance the doctor-patient relationship by eliminating administrative burden for clinicians and providing increased flexibility to provide the high-quality care that is most appropriate for their patients, thus improving quality while reducing expenditures.
