Americans spend more per-capita on medical care than just about any other country and, yet, they often have little to show for it. Americans have worse access to care than people in other countries, and are often less likely to receive primary care services, like preventive therapies and screening tests. Determined to address these problems, Medicare leaders have been testing out new models of primary care, hoping to find win-win situations – reimbursement schemes that improve quality while maintaining or lowering the cost of care.
So far, many of those efforts have failed.
Near the end of 2012, Medicare began giving extra money to almost 500 primary care practices across the US, money the practices used to try to improve the care they offered to their patients. The goal of this Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative was to prod primary care practices to make it easier for patients to: contact providers quickly; coordinate care with other specialists; provide care management to patients with complex chronic illnesses; and better engage with patients and their care givers. The extra Medicare payments were decent sized, almost $60,000 per physician per year. The practices could use this money to hire extra nurse practitioners, or to reimburse those who were working odd hours to give patients more access to care, or other efforts.
Medicare not only gave practices these upfront payments, but also offered to give practices extra money if they reduced overall spending for their Medicare population, an incentive known as shared savings.I am a primary care physician and for around 20 years I worked in VA medical centers, a system that, during my time there, did a great job of coordinating care between primary care physicians and sub-specialists, and of offering care management for patients with complex illnesses.
When I practiced in the VA, I often worked closely with pharmacists and nurse practitioners, for example, to address the need of patients with uncontrolled diabetes. So I am very excited that Medicare is trying to invest in and test ways of improving primary care.
Medicare administrators hoped that better primary care would lead to lower costs. Coordinating care with specialists, for example, should reduce unnecessary testing. Better care management should reduce the need for hospital care.
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