Tag: Pay for performance

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.

How to Fix Bad Incentives in Healthcare

When talking health policy, I hear the word “incentive” a lot. “Incentives are perverse.” “We need to realign incentives.” “Let’s provide an incentive for quality through payment reform.” Bla bla bla.

Let’s drop the ambiguities and actually talk specifics for a second. I promise you’ll learn more about healthcare incentives in the next 1 minute than you’ve ever learned in your life.

I can only think of two different kinds of incentives in healthcare: cultural and financial.

Our culture has expectations of healthcare organizations to put the patient first, to find ways to reduce errors, etc. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of getting the cultural incentives right in healthcare, but they can only take us so far without . . .

Financial incentives! A financial incentive works like this: If you do ____, you’ll make more money (i.e., profit). How are we doing on financial incentives? Well, we pay providers more for doing more (especially if it’s invasive); we pay providers more for making mistakes and then fixing them; we pay providers more if they band together to increase bargaining power; we pay providers the same amount even if their quality is poor. So . . . we haven’t done so well with the financial incentives.

But here’s how to think about what financial incentives are needed in any situation:

  1. Decide what job you want the organization/industry/whatever to perform
  2. Make it profit from doing that job

I, personally, think a healthcare system’s job is to get/keep us healthy (weird, I know). So that means healthcare organizations need to profit from getting/keeping us healthy; in other words, “profit from wellness” (that’s how they say it in The Innovator’s Prescription).

If we can find ways to get healthcare organizations to profit from wellness, it would solve all kinds of problems! They would be going nuts trying to provide preventive care. They would be spending lots more time with us training us how to manage chronic diseases so we don’t have ED visits and complications. They would be counseling us on weight loss and smoking cessation. And they would be working like crazy to reduce costly errors! (Quality problem: solved.)

So the government can either (1) try to fix bad underlying financial incentives through regulating the healthcare system to death or (2) focus on finding ways to help healthcare organizations’ underlying profit motive be patients’ wellness. One is the bariatric surgery approach, the other is a real solution.

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking more about this, and I should probably mention a few caveats. First, profit from wellness doesn’t work for end-of-life care, for obvious reasons, so a different incentive is needed then. Second, profit from wellness doesn’t work if the payer has a short time horizon because it won’t reap the savings from providing preventive care now to avoid more costly care later. Third, quality problems might not be completely solved just from profiting from wellness because I don’t know if better quality is always cheaper in the long run. Honestly, why do you people let me get away with this stuff by not posting scathing comments?

UPDATE 2: I think the definition of the healthcare industry’s job to “get/keep us healthy” isn’t quite specific enough. The job should really be defined as to get/keep us healthy over the long term, since I’d like to be healthy now and in the future. Thus, profit from long-term wellness. This time horizon issue is a key piece to the foundation on which we will build our future health system.

Bariatric Surgery on the Health System

Today I learned about a doctor group in Ohio that is advocating for a law to eliminate insurance companies’ wanton (and almost unrestricted) refusal to deny reimbursement for various health services. I applaud these efforts; but, I think their focus would lead me to categorize them as bariatric surgeons of the health system.

Bariatric surgery, A.K.A. weight-loss surgery, is criticized as (to reference Thoreau) hacking at the branches of evil rather than striking at the root. The root cause of obesity (in most cases) is a suboptimal diet and insufficient exercise. But, instead of going through painful lifestyle changes to solve the root of their obesity problem, people can now get bariatric surgery instead. (I should say here and now that I don’t think bariatric surgery is all bad–it has its uses, many of which are wonderful and important, as do advocacy groups such as the one spoken of above.)

How does this relate to the work being done by that noble doctor group in Ohio? They’re trying to contain the ill effects of an underlying incentive in the health system rather than change that underlying incentive that is causing insurance companies to seek every way possible to limit medical loss. (“Medical loss” is the term health insurance companies use to refer to their money they spent on paying healthcare providers for services rendered.)

What is this underlying incentive that insurance companies are rationally (yet probably unethically) responding to? They get paid more for spending as little as possible on health care. Instead, they need to get paid more for keeping patients healthy. If that incentive were to be changed, the whole issue of reimbursement denials would be solved.

Even “pay for performance” is another, more sophisticated form of health-system bariatric surgery–providers would naturally invest much more time and effort (e.g., investing in EMRs, crafting policies to help physicians more closely adhere to clinical guidelines, perform research in ways to reduce complication rates and hospital re-admissions, etc.) to find every possible way to keep patients healthy if it meant they would be more profitable as a result of it.

So, how can a payer get paid more to keep patients healthy? Integrated systems. Capitation. There are ways, but this post isn’t about the solutions so much as it is about understanding the causes of the problems. Sorry.

UPDATE: Another way to look at this would be using the carrots and sticks metaphor. Right now, our main way to negate the ill effects of bad underlying incentives in healthcare is by using sticks to punish the natural responses to the incentives the system provides. Using sticks is prone to getting “gamed” (i.e., people find ways to avoid the punishment without actually doing the desired action). Carrots, on the other hand, provide good underlying incentives (assuming the carrot is well-aligned with what we really want health-care providers to be doing for us), and they stimulate creativity to find more effective ways to get them.