Value-Based Care News

HHS Quality Summit to Examine Federal Value-Based Care Programs

The Quality Summit will convene public and private stakeholders to assess federal value-based care programs as part of the push for greater healthcare transparency.

Value-based care

Source: Xtelligent Healthcare Media

By Jacqueline LaPointe

- HHS recently announced the creation of the Quality Summit, which will bring together federal and private healthcare stakeholders to evaluate and streamline federal value-based care programs.

The summit is in response to the Trump Administration’s recent executive order calling for greater healthcare price and quality transparency. Part of the order directed several federal agencies, including HHS, to establish a “Health Quality Roadmap” to align and improve reporting on data and quality measures across Medicare, Medicaid, and the CHIP, as well as the health insurance marketplace, the military health system, and the VA health system.

The Quality Summit, which will be chaired by HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan and Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, a healthcare quality and patient safety expert, is the first step in developing the roadmap.

The group of government stakeholders and 15 non-government healthcare industry leaders will start by examining federal value-based care programs run by CMS, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and Indian Health Service (IHS).

According to the announcement, the group will “offer critical insight into discussions surrounding the modernization of HHS’s quality programs that will build upon a patient-centered approach that increases competition, quality, and access to care.” They will also work to identify regulations that burden providers and the mechanisms needed to enhance the delivery of high-quality care.

HHS noted that federal agencies have launched many quality and value-based care programs, with some going back nearly twenty years. But the programs have yet to undergo a systemic objective external review.

“Over the last decade we have seen efforts by HHS to incentivize the provision of quality care, only to be met with limited success,” HHS Deputy Secretary Hargan stated in the announcement. “This is in part because patients have not been empowered with meaningful or actionable information to inform their decision making. At the same time, important quality programs across the department have remained uncoordinated among the various agencies and inconsistent in their demands on healthcare providers.”

Hargan believes the Quality Summit “will not only strengthen the protections these programs afford patients, but also improve value by reducing costs and onerous requirements that are placed on providers and ultimately stand between patients and the high quality care they deserve.”

A lack of quality measure alignment across federal value-based care programs has been a major issue for providers and patients alike since the inception of the programs as early as 2000.

Hospital finance executives in a 2018 Healthcare Finance Management Association (HMFA) survey cited inconsistencies between payers, including quality measures, as the top barrier to value-based care adoption. Physicians in a separate 2018 report from Quest Diagnostics also called for less complex quality measurement.

Industry groups have also urged CMS to align quality measurement across Medicare and other federal healthcare programs to reduce the burdens of implementing value-based care.

“AMGA members are focused on providing the best care, and variation among CMS programs creates unnecessary impediments,” Chester A. Speed, JD, LLM, the association’s vice president of public policy, told CMS in 2017. “Unfortunately, depending on what type of Medicare coverage a patient has, the regulations governing coverage, payment, and quality reporting can vary dramatically. This creates an administrative burden that doesn’t serve the patient, the provider, or Medicare, itself.”

HHS plans to respond to industry-wide calls for quality measurement standardization through the Quality Summit. The agency did not reveal details on when the stakeholders will convene.