- CMS Announces New Participants for Alternative Payment Models in 2017 Modern Healthcare by Elizabeth Whitman—The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS) expects 359,000 clinicians to participate in four alternative payment models this year, the agency said Wednesday, touting those numbers as evidence of success in shifting away from fee-for-service and into value-based care. Those alternative payment models include accountable care organizations—the Medicare Shared Savings Program, the Next Generation ACO Model, and the Comprehensive End-Stage Renal Disease Care Model—and the Comprehensive Primary Care Plus Model. "By listening to physicians and engaging them as partners, CMS has been able to develop innovative payment reforms that bring physicians back to the core practice of medicine—caring for the patient," said CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt, in a statement.
- The Heroism of Incremental Care The New Yorker by Atul Gawande—"In this era of advancing information, it will become evident that, for everyone, life is a preexisting condition waiting to happen. We will all turn out to have—like the Silver Bridge and the growing crack in its critical steel link—a lurking heart condition or a tumor or a depression or some rare disease that needs to be managed. This is a problem for our health-care system. It doesn't put great value on care that takes time to pay off. But this is also an opportunity....We can give up an antiquated set of priorities and shift our focus from rescue medicine to lifelong incremental care. Or we can leave millions of people to suffer and die from conditions that, increasingly, can be predicted and managed. This isn't a bloodless policy choice; it's a medical emergency."
