Tag: Bundled payment

Healthcare Experts Often Support Good Healthcare Reforms for the Wrong Reasons

  • Image credit: Bill Watterson

This week’s post is a little later than usual, but next week will be back on track with a Tuesday post about Hayek’s book about socialism, The Road to Serfdom, and how it fits into my framework for categorizing governments.

Something I have noticed for many years now is that many good and important healthcare reforms are touted by experts for the wrong reasons. Supporting a good reform for the wrong reason may seem harmless, but without a clear understanding of the principles behind why the reform is important, the implementation may undermine much of the benefit of the reform, or it may not be evaluated based on the right expected impact (and, therefore, cause the reform to be incorrectly judged as a failure). Either one of these mistakes could ruin the reform.

Example 1 – Quality metrics reporting: This refers to making providers track and report a variety of quality metrics, which are then usually used to give quality-contingent bonuses. These quality metrics are also often reported publicly with hopes that it will add some accountability to providers and motivate the lower-quality ones to improve.

What many experts don’t realize is that quality-contingent bonuses are not going to make a big dent in our healthcare problems. They also don’t realize that the main purpose for quality metrics should be to help people make value-sensitive decisions, which means the tracked and reported metrics need to enable people to do this. Commonly used metrics these days, such as aggregate mortality numbers and overall patient satisfaction scores, aren’t super useful at achieving this goal.

Example 2 – High deductibles: Some experts say that if people have high deductibles, they’ve got some “skin in the game” and will therefore stop being such spendthrifts, which will decrease overutilization and total healthcare spending.

It’s true that a high deductible will reduce healthcare spending;, although, unfortunately, people tend to decrease unnecessary AND necessary care. That’s what the classic Rand Health Insurance Experiment demonstrated. But lowering spending is not the main purpose of high deductibles. The primary benefit of them is that they make people actually consider price when they are choosing where they will get care, which allows people to start preferentially choosing higher-value providers (i.e., make value-sensitive decisions). Of course, this only applies to services that cost less than the deductible.

Example 3 – Bundled payments: These are seen as a way to get providers to integrate more and, through that integration, “trim the fat” (what’s with all the flesh metaphors?). Usually the reduction in total episode costs comes from providers becoming less likely to discharge people to skilled nursing facilities.

Bundled payments do get providers to send fewer patients to nursing facilities and to find other superficial ways to decrease total episode costs, but the primary benefit is that they allow people to compare, apples to apples, the total cost of a care episode. Again, it’s all about removing barriers to value-sensitive decisions. This will lead to complete care process transformations as providers become motivated to improve value relative to competitors and are assured they will win greater profit as a result. So implementing bundled payments with a single provider in a region will likely result in only very modest benefits, which will come from those superficial low-hanging-fruit types of changes.

That’s enough examples for this week! Merry Christmas, and may everyone do good things for the right reasons.

An Example of How Evidence Can Be Misleading (Bundled Payments Version)

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Bundled payments are a proven strategy in non-healthcare industries, only we call them by different names. We say we’re paying for a “hotel room” when really we’re paying for the use of the room, the cleaning of the room, the “free” wifi, the “free” continental breakfast, access to the concierge, etc. We say we’re paying for a “cruise” when really we’re paying for the cabin, the unlimited food, the port fees, the access to the shows, use of the onboard pools, etc. These terms (“hotel room” and “cruise” are just two examples) are shorthand terms that refer to the bundle of goods and services you get when you pay that single price. That’s how it works in every industry.

Except healthcare. When we get a bill for a knee replacement, it only contains the surgeon’s cost (okay okay, including the hardware). But there’s also a bill for the anesthesiologist. And for the operating room. And for the hospitalization if you need to stay.

Why would all those things be listed individually if you know you will need a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, and an operating room every single time you get a knee replacement?

Enter bundled payments. They finally turn healthcare a little bit more into a normal industry by allowing patients to pay a single price for the bundle of services that should always be included in that one upfront price.

Sidenote: yes, healthcare is and should always be different from other industries in many important ways. For more details on that, read Arrow’s seminal article on the topic. None of this is incompatible with those insights.

But apparently bundled payments are not very helpful according to this Health Affairs review of the evidence. What gives?

When I see a paper like that, I appreciate the effort to summarize the evidence, but I cringe thinking about all the headlines and misinterpretations and misconceptions that it will perpetuate. People are going to start saying that our large-scale efforts to implement bundled payments are a waste of money . . . and they have evidence to back them up!

But that’s totally the wrong conclusion. This is how I interpret this study: I first think about the overall purpose of bundled payments. When you put their role into the context of the Healthcare Incentives Framework, their purpose is to allow patients to know up front the full price for accomplishing the job they have (get their knee functional again). This enables the patient to compare the price of different options. If they also have quality information of those options, now patients have the ability to shop for the best value (Value = Quality / Price). And when patients start choosing which provider to do their knee replacement based on value, market share starts to shift to the higher-value providers, thus forcing the lower-value providers to change in ways that either raise their quality, lower their price, or (hopefully) both! This is the potential benefit of bundled payments–it is an essential component in stimulating a newfound evolution toward higher quality and lower prices in the market for that specific service.

Compare that to how these studies evaluated the utility of bundled payments: They implemented them for a single procedure and usually with just one of many insurers a provider contracts with. Thus, in most cases the providers were still reimbursed the old fashioned way by all their other insurers. And I would guess that very few competitors in any given region were participating in the same bundled payment program. Therefore, there was no way providers were going to completely shift how they deliver the service because of the narrow scope, a lack of uniform incentives, and a lack of any strong financial imperative to do so (their biggest risk was only of losing a percentage of revenue on small portion of their patients–enough to motivate them to try to do some things a little differently but not to completely redesign how they deliver care–and the risk of losing market share to their competitors due to low value was almost nil). In short, these studies did not get even close to creating the environment for an evolution toward higher value.

With this as context, it’s a surprise to me that any of these bundled payment studies found any benefit at all!

Now, if I could perform my dream study (the design details here and here), that would make a splash. It would get us much closer to the true estimation of how impactful bundled payments could be in healthcare. And until a study like that is done, remember the importance of context, and take any evidence on the impacts of bundled payments with a large grain of salt.

Next week I’ll start looking at Joe Biden’s healthcare plans, so look forward to that!

What Is an ACO? What Is a Medical Home? What Is Bundled Billing? What Is P4P?

Image credit: shutterstock.com
Image credit: shutterstock.com

Our healthcare system is currently in experimentation mode–we are trying thousands of experiments to figure out how providers can be rewarded for “value instead of volume.” All the new terminology and reimbursement ideas accompanying these reforms can be hard to keep straight if you’re not steeped in this stuff every day, but guess what? There aren’t actually that many different ideas being tried; there are just a bunch of the same ideas being tried in various combinations. First I’ll describe those four basic ideas, and then I’ll show how they are the building blocks of all the main payment reform experiments out there.

Quality bonus: Give a provider more money when he hits performance targets on whatever quality metrics are important to the payer.

Utilization bonus: Utilization metrics and quality metrics are not usually separated, but they should be. Here’s the difference: improved performance on a quality metric increases spending; improved performance on a utilization metric decreases spending. They both improve quality, but they have different effects on total healthcare spending. So, for example, ED utilization rates and readmission rates would be considered utilization metrics. And childhood immunization rates and smoking cessation rates would also be considered utilization metrics because they tend to be cost saving. Insurers love giving providers bonuses on utilization metrics because they are stimulating providers to lower the amount being spent on healthcare.

Shared savings: If a provider can decrease spending for an episode of care (which could be defined as narrowly as all the care involved in performing a single surgery or as broadly as all the care a person needs for an entire year of chronic disease management), the insurer will share some of those savings with him.

Capitation: The amount a provider gets paid is prospectively determined and will not change regardless of how much or how little care that patient ends up receiving. Again, this could be defined narrowly, such as all the care involved in performing a single surgery (in which case it’s actually called a “bundled payment”), or it could be defined broadly, such as for all the care a person needs for an entire year.

By the way, did you notice that shared savings and capitation are almost the same thing? The only difference is who bears how much risk. In shared savings, the risk is shared, which means that if the costs of care come in lower than expected, the insurer gets some of the savings and the provider gets some of the savings. In capitation, the provider bears all the risk, which means that if the costs of care come in lower than expected, the provider gets all of the savings.

Okay, now that I have listed out those four ideas, take a look at the popular payment reforms of the day . . .

Medical Home

General idea:

  • Give a primary-care provider a per member per month “care management fee” (in addition to what he normally gets paid) for providing additional services (such as care coordination with specialists, after-hours access to care, care management plans for complex patients, and more)
  • Also give the primary-care provider bonuses when he meets cost and/or quality targets

Breaking down a medical home:

  • A care management fee is actually a utilization bonus (because the net effect of the provider offering all those services is to avoid a lot of care down the road)
  • A bonus for meeting quality targets is either a quality bonus or a utilization bonus depending on the specific metrics used
  • A bonus for meeting cost targets is shared savings

Accountable Care Organization (ACO)

General idea:

  • Give a group of providers bonuses when they lower the total cost of care of their patients (but the bonuses are contingent upon meeting quality targets).

Breaking down an ACO:

  • A bonus for lowering the total cost of care is shared savings
  • When a bonus is contingent upon meeting quality targets, that means it’s also a quality or utilization bonus (depending on the specific quality metrics used)

Pay for Performance (P4P)

General idea:

  • Give a provider bonuses when she meets quality targets.

Breaking down P4P:

  • This is either a quality or utilization bonus (depending on the specific quality metrics used), but it tends to be utilization bonuses because insurers especially like when providers decrease the amount of money they have to fork out

Bundled Payment/Episode-of-care Payment

General idea:

  • Give a group of providers a single payment for an episode of care regardless of the services provided.

Breaking down bundled payment:

  • A bundled payment is a narrow form of capitation

There you have it. They are all repetitions of the same ideas but combined in different ways.