HHS Announces $840M initiative to Lower Costs and Improve Care
The Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative aims to rethink and redesign health practices on multiple levels.
- Today, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a new initiative that will fund successful applicants who work directly with medical providers to rethink and redesign their practices. The goal is to move more physicians from systems driven by quantity of care to ones focused on patient’s health outcomes and coordinated health care systems.
According to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burnwell, through the Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative, the HHS will invest $840 million over the next four years to support 150,000 clinicians. Through incentives, tools and information, the initiative will encourage doctors to team with their peers and others to move from volume-driven systems to a value-based, patient-centered and coordinated health care services.
Successful applicants will demonstrate the ability to achieve progress toward measurable goals, such as improving clinical outcomes, reducing unnecessary testing, achieving cost savings and avoiding unnecessary hospitalizations.
“The administration is partnering with clinicians to find better ways to deliver care, pay providers and distribute information to improve the quality of care we receive and spend our nation’s dollars more wisely,” Burwell said in the announcement. “We all have a stake in achieving these goals and delivering for patients, providers and taxpayers alike.”
This is one part of a strategy advanced by the Affordable Care Act to strengthen the quality of patient care and spend health care dollars more wisely. It builds off of the success of other models and programs like Accountable Care Organizations and the Quality Improvement Organization Program. It is a multi-pronged approach to technical assistance that will identify health care delivery models that work and rapidly spread the successful ones to other providers and clinicians.
Patrick Conway, M.D., a deputy administrator for innovation and quality and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) chief medical officer added that this model will support and build partnerships with doctors and other clinicians across the country to provide better care to their patients. Clinicians want to spend time with their patients, coordinate care, and improve patient outcomes, and the CMS wants to be a collaborative partner helping clinicians achieve those goals and spread best practices across the nation.
The American Medical Association (AMA) released a statement from Barbara McAneny, the chair of the Board of Trustees for AMA, after the announcement, applauding this initiative to support practice transformation. The AMA has been urging administrators to invest in innovations like new payment and delivery models and practice transformation can lead to improvements in the quality of care for patients, control health care costs and enhance practice sustainability as physicians embrace innovative new models.
“The Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative will achieve a number of important goals. It will foster collaboration among a broad community of practices of various sizes, including collaboration between primary care physicians and specialists. It will also develop a network for sharing information among medical societies as well as multi-stakeholder regional collaboratives to support practice transformation,” McAneny said.
