A national multi-sector alliance of healthcare stakeholders has announced the creation of the Addiction Recovery Medical Home (ARMH) model, an alternative payment model (APM) engineered to provide patients with a long-term, comprehensive and integrated pathway to treatment and recovery.
Some of the organizations and groups involved include Leavitt Partners, Facing Addiction with NCADD (The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence) and Remedy Partners, along with other healthcare companies.
The ARMH framework looks to establish a broad continuum of care ranging from emergent and stabilizing acute-care settings to community-based services and support that are essential to managing patient needs in a chronic disease model, officials noted in a press release. The proposed payment model, which incorporates aspects of fee-for-service, episodes-of-care, quality-adjustments and shared-savings, will aim to promote improved integration of treatment and recovery resources with corresponding financial incentives that benefit all stakeholders when the patient is well managed by a multi-disciplinary care team, according to officials.
“The current payment models have failed to encourage the lasting recovery of the millions of people who are dealing with addiction,” said Chris Garcia, CEO of Remedy Partners, a Darien, Conn.-based company that helps hospitals and physicians with bundled payment programs. “The ARMH model offers the potential to refocus the energies of physicians and other care givers on what matters, helping the patient on the pathway to lasting recovery.”
The Alliance for Recovery-Centered Addiction Health Services (Alliance) released a year-long consensus report during last week’s Summit for Addiction Recovery Payment Reform. “As addiction to alcohol and other drugs now impacts 1 in 3 households in America, we must urgently work to turn the tide on this health crisis,” Greg Williams, a person in long-term recovery and Facing Addiction with NCADD’s executive vice president, said in a statement. “In late 2016, the U.S. Surgeon General issued the seminal report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health: Facing Addiction In America. In this report, an urgent call to action for mainstream health systems to begin integration of substance use health services was afforded an entire chapter, and the industry leaders in this Alliance have responded in unprecedented fashion to that call.”
The Alliance intends to pilot the ARMH model in at least two markets beginning in 2019. Its executives say that a rigorous research methodology will be developed and leveraged to study the effects of the model when compared to non-ARMH models of care and to study correlations between specific model tenets and the corresponding outputs.
“We see the most progress in healthcare when the clinical and the economic incentives are aligned. Treating substance use is tough enough, but without a thoughtful economic system in place, it is going to be very slow going,” noted David Shulkin, M.D., former Secretary, U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs and Chairman, Remedy Partners National Advisory Board. “The addiction recovery medical home model of care aligns the interests of patients, providers and payers through a new risk-based payment methodology. Combined with the right therapeutic approaches to care, this payment system is the type of innovation that we need to accelerate our progress in dealing with the opioid crisis.”
