16 Strategic Initiatives from CMS. 3,000 healthcare leaders from around the country gathered in Baltimore. Simultaneous sessions. From this “drinking from the fire hydrant” experience, we distilled Our “Top Three Takeaways” from our Reveleer crew attending, Vice President of Quality Michael Curran and our consultant, Dr. Umbereen Nehal, a national expert on Social Determinants of Health.
1) Patient-Centered Measurement
Administrator Verma described getting applause for her “Patients over Paperwork” initiative which allows providers to focus on their patients over filling out paperwork by reducing the total number of measures and reducing reporting burden by digitizing measurement. More broadly, there was focus on “Meaningful Measures” to ensure what is measured matters to patients. That includes patient experience, care coordination, and what information is needed to make care decisions for the best care in that local setting. This is part of an overall approach to improve transparency to empower consumers.
2) Interoperability
Traditionally this has meant systems talking to each other for administrator or clinician use. Increasingly this means data following the human patient through the care continuum. That means, when a patient or member transitions from hospital to nursing home to home or changes insurance, there should be access to all that data. This is an important way to address the thorny issue of attribution or who “owns” the care and outcomes of a patient in value-based care? A common excuse is that there is lack of access to data. Also, while patients are measured for system purposes, they rarely can access their own data. CMS wants to make sure patients can own and access their own data.
CMS’s is ensuring its own websites are more coordinated. Attendees got to test drive a new Medicare website that puts all provider information – physicians, hospitals, nursing homes, home health, etc – in one place for easy side by side comparisons.
3) Population Health
A top tier issue was improving the health of all Americans across all settings (rural, urban), health status, and identity (race, gender). Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) was a hot topic, both how to measure and how to act upon the data for outcomes. Needed areas of innovation and research identified include the SDoH intervention, community partner linkage, and evidence of effectiveness. We know that up to 70% of preventable healthcare costs are driven by SDoH. This echoes what Reveleer CEO Jay Ackerman heard at JPM20. It’s exciting when you find alignment of both government agencies, payers, and venture capital.