Providers and policymakers will explore implementation strategies for bundled-payment models and address physician concerns about the CMS' bundled-payment experiments at the Fifth National Bundled Payment Summit in Washington.
The summit, June 3-5, will feature Dr. Rahul Rajkumar, acting deputy director of the CMS Innovation Center. He will provide an update on Medicare's Bundled Payment for Care Improvement initiative.
The summit comes three months after the CMS released its first analysis examining the progress of the bundled-payment model. That report was mostly inconclusive because of small sample sizes and short time frames. The initial participants in the demonstration, which started in October 2013, were hospitals and physician group practices. That group expanded to 93 participants for the first quarter of 2014.
The summit's chair, Francois de Brantes, executive director of the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute, said he's heard some concern from doctors about the CMS' initiative. Some providers have been turned off because they say payments don't adequately take into account the illness severity of their enrolled populations. They are also frustrated by what they say are the agency's changing performance standards.
The summit also will focus on successful strategies to implement bundled payment arrangements with private- and public-sector insurers and how to best engage consumers in the programs.
