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The Affordable Care Act played a major role in transitioning American health care away from fee-for-service payment. We explore the spread of payment reforms since the implementation of the ACA, both nationally and in North Carolina; the corresponding effects on health care costs and quality; and further steps needed to achieve greater transformation., (©2020 by the North Carolina Institute of Medicine and The Duke Endowment. All rights reserved.)

North Carolina has received national attention for its approach to health care payment and delivery reform. Importantly, payment reform alone is not enough to drive systematic changes in care delivery. We highlight the importance of progress in four complementary areas to achieve system-wide payment and care reform., (©2020 by the North Carolina Institute of Medicine and The Duke Endowment. All rights reserved.)

Importance: Recent health care reforms aim to increase patient access, reduce costs, and improve health care quality as payers turn to payment reform for greater value. Cardiologists need to understand emerging payment models to succeed in the evolving payment landscape. We review existing payment and delivery reforms that affect cardiologists, present 4 emerging examples, and consider their implications for clinical practice., Observations: Public and commercial payers have recently implemented payment reforms and new models are evolving. Most cardiology models are modified fee-for-service or address procedural or episodic care, but population models are also emerging. Although there is widespread agreement that payment reform is needed, existing programs have significant limitations and the adoption of new programs has been slow. New payment reforms address some of these problems, but many details remain undefined., Conclusions and Relevance: Early payment reforms were voluntary and cardiologists' participation is variable. However, conventional fee-for-service will become less viable, and enrollment in new payment models will be unavoidable. Early participation in new payment models will allow clinicians to develop expertise in new care pathways during a period of relatively lower risk.

Cancer care is transforming, moving toward increasingly personalized treatment with the potential to save and improve many more lives. Many oncologists and policymakers view current fee-for-service payments as an obstacle to providing more efficient, high-quality cancer care. However, payment reforms create new uncertainties for oncologists and may be challenging to implement. In this article, we illustrate how accountable care payment reforms that directly align payments with quality and cost measures are being implemented and the opportunities and challenges they present. These payment models provide more flexibility to oncologists and other providers to give patients the personalized care they need, along with more accountability for demonstrating quality improvements and overall cost or cost growth reductions. Such payment reforms increase the importance of person-level quality and cost measures as well as data analysis to improve measured performance. We describe key features of quality and cost measures needed to support accountable care payment reforms in oncology. Finally, we propose policy recommendations to move incrementally but fundamentally to payment systems that support higher-value care in oncology., (Copyright © 2015 by American Society of Clinical Oncology.)

Previous research suggests that "direct" reforms to the liability system-reforms designed to reduce the level of compensation to potential claimants-reduce medical expenditures without important consequences for patient health outcomes. We extend this research by identifying the mechanisms through which reforms affect the behavior of health care providers. Although we find that direct reforms improve medical productivity primarily by reducing malpractice claims rates and compensation conditional on a claim, our results suggest that other policies that reduce the time spent and the amount of conflict involved in defending against a claim can also reduce defensive practices substantially. In addition, we find that "malpractice pressure" has a more significant impact on diagnostic rather than therapeutic treatment decisions. Our results provide an empirical foundation for simulating the effects of untried malpractice reforms on health care expenditures and outcomes, based on their predicted effects on the malpractice pressure facing medical providers.

Background: Quality measurement has become a priority for national healthcare reform, and valid measures are necessary to discriminate hospital performance and support value‐based healthcare delivery. The Commission on Cancer (CoC) is the largest cancer‐specific accreditor of hospital quality in the United States and has implemented Quality of Care Measures to evaluate cancer care delivery. However, none has been formally tested as a valid metric for assessing hospital performance based on actual patient outcomes. Methods: Eligibility and compliance with the Quality of Care Measures are reported within the National Cancer Database, which also captures data for robust patient‐level risk adjustment. Hospital‐level compliance was calculated for the core measures, and the association with patient survival was tested using Cox regression. Results: Seven hundred sixty‐eight thousand nine hundred sixty‐nine unique cancer cases were included from 1323 facilities. Increasing hospital‐level compliance was associated with improved survival for only two measures, including a 35% reduced risk of mortality for the gastric cancer measure G15RLN (HR 0.65, 95% CI 0.58–0.72) and a 19% reduced risk of mortality for the colon cancer measure 12RLN (HR 0.81, 95% CI 0.77–0.85). For the lung cancer measure LNoSurg, increasing compliance was paradoxically associated with an increased risk of mortality (HR 1.14, 95% CI 1.08–1.20). For the remaining measures, hospital‐level compliance demonstrated no consistent association with patient survival. Conclusion: Hospital‐level compliance with the CoC's Quality of Care Measures is not uniformly aligned with patient survival. In their current form, these measures do not reliably discriminate hospital performance and are limited as a tool for value‐based healthcare delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, in anticipation of the US presidential election and forthcoming new administration, the National Academy of Medicine launched a strategic initiative to marshal expert guidance on pressing health and health care priorities. Published as Vital Directions for Health and Health Care, the products of the initiative provide trusted, nonpartisan, evidence-based analysis of critical issues in health, health care, and biomedical science. The current collection of articles published in Health Affairs builds on the initial Vital Directions series by addressing a set of issues that have a particularly compelling need for attention from the next administration: health costs and financing, early childhood and maternal health, mental health and addiction, better health and health care for older adults, and infectious disease threats. The articles also reflect the current experience with both the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the health inequities that have been drawn out sharply by COVID-19, as well as the implications going forward for action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New alternative payment models aiming to limit preventable or wasteful spending while improving quality are well-suited for the seriously ill, who often receive expensive, fragmented care that does not account for their needs. Accountable Care Organizations in particular support innovative efforts to identify and transform care for this patient population. Improving model components like quality measurement and risk adjustment and building a diverse palliative care-trained workforce will accelerate progress by helping more organizations participate in serious illness models and develop capabilities to improve care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To succeed, health care reform must slow spending growth while improving quality. We propose a new approach to help achieve more integrated and efficient care by fostering local organizational accountability for quality and costs through performance measurement and "shared savings" payment reform. The approach is practical and feasible: it is voluntary for providers, builds on current referral patterns, requires no change in benefits or lock-in for beneficiaries, and offers the possibility of sustained provider incomes even as total costs are constrained. We simulate the potential expenditure impact and show that significant Medicare savings are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses U.S. health care reform to move toward alternative payment models (APMs) for medical care. Topics include the use of public-private collaboration in payment reforms, the use of value-based health care in relation to U.S. federal payments, and the promotion of data exchange capacities using health information technology.

Innovative medical products offer significant and potentially transformative impacts on health, but they create concerns about rising spending and whether this rise is translating into higher value. The result is increasing pressure to pay for therapies in a way that is tied to their value to stakeholders through improving outcomes, reducing disease complications, and addressing concerns about affordability. Policy responses include the growing application of health technology assessments based on available evidence to determine unit prices, as well as alternatives to volume-based payment that adjust product payments based on predictors or measures of value. Building on existing frameworks for value-based payment for health care providers, we developed an analogous framework for medical products, including drugs, devices, and diagnostic tools. We illustrate each of these types of alternative payment mechanisms and describe the conditions under which each may be useful. We discuss how the use of this framework can help track reforms, improve evidence, and advance policy analysis involving medical product payment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer care suffers from many of the well-known flaws in the American health care delivery system. Most of the care delivery shortfalls and inefficiencies can be tied, in part, back to payment systems that support high-cost procedures rather than focusing on assisting providers in improving the outcomes of individual patients and the value of care being delivered. We describe various new models of physician payment that can serve as a foundation for a shift away from the current reimbursement system for cancer care to support better outcomes and avoid preventable costs. These recent payment reforms include the implementation of clinical pathways, bundled or episodic payments, payments tied to quality improvements, and the patient-centered oncology medical home. We then describe how these reforms can be supported in a blended payment model that transitions away from, but still contains elements of, fee-for-service payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]