Medicare's Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative - A Two Year Report

After all the buzz (for example) around the coming launch of CMS' Comprehensive Primary Care "Plus" program,  the New England Journal of Medicine (or NEJM) just published a "special article" on the original Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) initiative.

This is important if you think CMS' approach to supporting primary care is the fix for what ails the U.S. health care system.

Population Health Blog readers may recall that two years ago, CMS launched CPC. This is a still ongoing four-year multi-payer study to determine whether primary care that is "turbocharged" with medical home-style capabilities (see here, here and here - see page 8) would increase quality and lower health care costs. 

The term "multi-payer" is important, because CMS recognized that clinics struggled with providing medical home care to some, but not all, patients on the basis of their insurance.  Better to have one standard of care to all patients.

The NEJM article is an analysis of CPC's results after two years. 

To summarize how CPC was set up, 502 clinics (from 978 applicants) across 8 states participated along with a total of 39 other insurers.  In addition to the usual fee schedules, the Medicare and the other insurers paid a per patient severity-based "care management fee" that, on average, ranged from $8 to $40 per beneficiary per month (PBPM). Practices were also promised an additional bonus if, after two years, they reduced health care costs (i.e., shared savings) and improved various quality measures and performed well in surveys about the patients' experience of care.

These CPC practices' outcomes were compared to a propensity matched group of non-participating practices with a similar electronic health record (EHR) infrastructure that cared for a set of patients with similar levels of disease and baseline costs. 30% of these practices had applied but were not accepted in the initiative. The total number of comparison practices was 908.

Results?  Not good.

Aft the end of two years, there was no statistically (p > .05) significant difference in the growth of health care costs between the CPC and control sites.  This was true whether just claims costs were examined (a negligible difference of $11 per patient per month favoring the CPC sites), or whether claims costs plus the additional fees were examined (a difference of $7 favoring the comparison sites).

When patient costs were examined by the burden of disease, there was no indication that more costly patients achieved any savings. 

CPC sites had a statistically significant reduction in outpatient office visits, but not in hospitalizations.

While the difference in claims expense failed to be statistically significant, the total additional fees collected by the participating sites amounted to a financially significant $389,000. This represented a 15% increase in their income. 

Was quality of care improved?

Patients with diabetes and a high burden of illness were more 3% more (p<.05) likely to receive the recommended follow-up measures to manage their disease. Otherwise, "the initiative did not have significant effects on the processes used as measures of the quality of care for the full sample."

Patient experience of care?

While surveys showed small increases in patient support, "there were no significant effects on other composite measures: ability of patients to obtain timely appointments, care, and information; how well providers communicate with patients; provider’s knowledge of care patient received from other providers; and overall rating of providers by patients."

Yikes. Ouch. Egads.

The authors correctly point out that CPC is a four year program and that it still may be too early to see the impact of the medical home turbocharging.  That was pointed out in the negative one year evaluation.  Maybe something will turn up at three or four years.

In addition, CMS has a lot of other value-based initiatives underway, which may have biased the results.  There may be a "ceiling effect" among the participating sites as well as the control sites, which were already working to reduce (for example) rehospitalizations or pursue the fee schedule modifiers.

It's also important to note that the impact on the other insurers' costs and patient quality was not reported.  It's possible that they saw a benefit.

The PHB's take?

1.  Many care management programs achieve claims reduction with savings (for example) within one to two years.  If CPC hasn't succeeded by now, it probably won't.  And if the just-announced CPC Plus is modelled after this, it's hard to see how that program will turn out any differently.

2. It is possible that, within all the statistical noise, there were some primary care sites with particularly robust approaches to care that did bend the cost curve.  CMS should seek these sites out and find out more about their secret sauce.  More on that in a future post.

2.  If CPC's approach to care is ultimately shown to not bend the curve, what's the problem? 

The PHB continues to believe that one size doesn't fit all and not all patients benefit from care management. Many patients, even those with chronic conditions are quite stable and need minimum attention; some patients are so sick that no intervention will keep them out of emergency rooms and hospitals. As pointed out here, as more and more patients are enrolled in care management, the return on investment can paradoxically go down. Better to focus on patients who are not only at risk, but have "impactable" condition profiles.

In addition, CPC is based on a 5 year-old model of care. Things have changed since then: modern population health brings many more resources to the table.  That not only includes in-depth analytics support (for example, to define those patients who are at greatest risk) but mHealth. For example, there is one innovative company (the PHB's Shameless Commerce Dept. over on the right side of your screen) that provides recently discharged patients with an app-enabled handheld configured to provide close follow-up.  And so on.

3. It may be that care management works best in a managed care setting.  CPC is a study of classic fee-fore-service Medicare beneficiaries with access to any participating Medicare provider. In Medicare managed care, the insurers and their providers have an even larger incentive to maximize quality and lower cost.  If that's the case, CMS - despite their commitment to innovation - may want to get out of the care management business, because they just don't know how to do it.

An Update on the Evidence of the Impact of the Patient Centered Medical Home on Cost and Quality: Of Soup and Weather Vanes

In its work with a variety of payer and provider customers, the Population Health Blog has advised that primary care medical home planning is more "soup" than "soufflé," and that outcomes are more a matter of direction than preciseness.  Naturally, the MBA-types that populate and advise the C-suites and Boards of our health institutions never liked hearing that, preferring instead to impose their notions of cookbook orderliness on what they disdain as inefficient.

Bunk.

Anyone who has had an underinsured patient in crisis in their clinic at 4 in the afternoon knows what the PHB is talking about.

Which is why the trained professionals who actually take care of primary care patients will find a lot to agree with in the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative's report on the Patient Centered Medical Home's Impact on Cost and Quality. 

This is a summary of the 30 recent peer-reviewed, state, industry or federal publications examining medical homes' impact on cost, utilization or quality.  There are pages of tables that conveniently describe the initiatives, the payment methodology, their impact on cost/utilization (mostly good), and the impact on other outcomes (mostly good).  To the PCPCC's credit, the review is free of the trade association-style framing that can obscure neutral assessments of the data; it even includes an entire section dedicated to study limitations.  Good for them.

Two PHB Insights

   

Soup: While often portrayed as a caveat, one of the major insights of the report is that the PCMH is best thought of as a "model" of care defined by a set of "attributes" that include patient-centeredness, comprehensiveness, coordination of care, accessibility and quality/safety.  Do right by adapting those principles into a clinic and, to paraphrase Justice Stewart, you'll know it when you see it.  Turning to the "soup" analogy, if it's liquid, there's stock, the ingredients are softened and the flavors have been extracted into a broth, you've got something that will satisfy. 

Let a thousand medical home clinics bloom.

Direction: Another major point of the review is that outcomes vary considerably, and not just in terms of dollar impacts, but on various measures of utilization and outcomes.  The insight here is that the "directionality" of this model of care is "pointing" toward lower overall costs with better clinical outcomes.  Unfortunately for administrators and insurers everywhere, the answer to "how much" is that "it depends." 

Fortunately for patients, the wind is blowing in the right direction

There are some other interesting take-aways. 

As "alternative payment models" (reminding the PHB to also use acronym "APMs" whenever possible) expand, the funding for PCMHs is likely to grow. The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (another acronym "MACRA") has fans in the PCMH community. 

$4.90 per patient per month is an average payment for medical home services, with dollar add-ons possible from various measures of performance, shared savings, care coordination, pre-payment and risk adjustment (see above on how "it depends"). 

Multi-payer collaboration convening commercial and government payers is more likely to have an impact on PCMH outcomes than single payer programs. Based on experience, this reminds the PHB of a similarity between the PHB spouse and Medicare: compromise is always possible so long as you do it her way.

Next Steps

The PHB couldn't have said it better.  Advocates for the PCMH need to continue to share their design and outcomes in the public square so that everyone can better understand its strengths as well as weaknesses and to make this soup even better.  As the report concludes

"Investment (ROI) or “total cost of care” research is needed that assesses the costs associated with PCMH transformation (or “upstream” spending) that results in “downstream” savings, through reduced ER visits or hospitalizations. This would demonstrate the extent to which spending on primary care results in long term ROI to the overall health system."

"As in past years, there was a dearth of studies that evaluated cost or utilization measures together with patient experience or provider satisfaction and health outcomes, essential elements of the Triple Aim. As we evaluate cost outcomes associated with the model, we must increasingly evaluate the model as a whole to ensure that cost savings and better patient care go hand in hand."

Soup and vane images are from Wikipedia

You Get What You Pay For in Cancer Care and Insurers Get What They Save With the Medical Home

The latest issue of Health Affairs is out and the Population Health Blog couldn't stay away. 

Three interesting articles:

The United States healthcare system has been criticized for spending too much of its treasure for too little in the way of outcomes.  Well, it's not that simple.  Stevens and colleagues in this just published Health Affairs study examined global cancer spending and found that increased spending on treatment correlated with drops in cancer mortality. From 1995 to 2007, the U.S. experienced a growth of $18,000 per cancer patient and dropped mortality among amenable cancers from 55 to 45 per 100,000.  Other than Japan and Finland (which benefit from already low levels of cancer plus sociodemographic factors like this and this), no other country has achieved that level of success.

In other words, you get what you pay for.  And when it comes to cancer, residents of the U.S. are not only paying, but getting a lot.

And speaking of payment, the same issue of Health Affairs has an article on multipayer medical home initiatives. The Population Health Blog didn't know this, but 17 of these initiatives have been launched since 2008.  Most were launched by states, not only because they controlled Medicaid's participation, but because they could blunt antitrust concerns. Challenges included agreeing on the criteria for provider participation, standardizing the payment models, and establishing criteria for success. What's more, the political landscape (health reform) and science (risk stratification, for example) has changed over the years. .

In other words, there is still no single approach to the medical home. When you've seen one statewide medical home initiative, you've seen one medical home initiative.

And speaking of initiatives, Geisinger's medical home program was also featured in Health Affairs. This observational study found that its care management nurses were independently associated with lower health care costs for as many as seven years.  That's good news.

But, the PHB knows that the Geisinger Health System is comprised of provider entities (such as its hospitals and the clinic) as well as a managed care insurance plan called Geisinger Health Plan (GHP). According to the article, "GHP hires, trains and manages the embedded case managers, partly because practices often lack resources to support such capabilities."

In other words, since.....

1) reducing health care costs will only benefit the holder of risk (the insurer) and

2) typical primary care settings lack the resources to change their approach to care,

....the real lesson of Geisinger's ProvenCare is that ownership of the medical home by commercial health insurers is an important option in assuring its success.

The Patient Centered Medical Home, Medicare's Comprehensive Primary Care Intiative and Cost Neutrality

Like this, but with snow

Oh my, he was really angry.

Back when the teenage Population Health Blog was living in New York, our family had a small garden tractor that was outfitted with a snowplow. After a particularly heavy snowfall, the PHB's father assigned the son the task of clearing the driveway. When the obliging PHB ran out of space to push the snow, its solution was to eschew use of a shovel and ram piles of snow outward by repeatedly backing up and accelerating forward in 4th gear. Teenage cries of "ramming speed!" seemed like a good idea at the time, but it really mangled the metal struts that held the plow to the front end of the tractor.

In economic terms, any savings the father achieved in outsourcing the snow removal was chewed up by hours of do-it-yourself blacksmithing that weekend. The driveway may have been cleared, but to the PHB father, the entire transaction ultimately ended up being a cost neutral bust.

Which brings CMS' Comprehensive Primary Care ("CPC") Initiative to mind. Thanks to the just-concluded Medical Home Summit, the PHB got to hear one of the authors of a CPC deep-dive analysis speak to the initiative's first-year findings.

 The entire report can be found here.

Very briefly, by October of 2012, CMS got Medicaid and 29 commercial health insurers to agree to ALL align and have everyone - including Medicare - to pay participating primary care sites a fee for Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) style care management.

 The rationale for this arrangement was to spare the clinics from having to offer the PCMH to only some of their patients. By imposing a "critical mass of payers" all patients had equal access to the same benefit.  That meant that practices wouldn't have to deal with the variations of different payer-dependent work flows and payment structures.

More than 500 practices (with an average of 4.4 providers) serving more than 2.5 million patients in 7 Medicare regions agreed to participate. In order to do that, the practices had to demonstrate that they had met meaningful-use criteria for their electronic health records (EHRs), had been officially recognized as a PCMH and had experience in quality improvement.

Once they were in the CPC, they were not only paid additional care management fees by CMS, but received quarterly feedback reports and technical assistance in achieving CMS mandated "milestones" (they can be found on page 84)  Over the course of the first year, practices received a median of $226,000 in care management fees.

At the end of one year, compared to propensity-matched non-CPC practices, CMS averaged $20 per beneficiary per month in care management fees.  They saved $14 per beneficiary per month in claims expense.  Compared to the non-participating sites, that $6 in additional cost did not achieve statistical significance.  Because the confidence intervals crossed $0, the conclusion was that CPC was cost neutral (the results can be found on page 120).  Some of the regions had statistically significant savings, while other regions had statistically significant losses.

The PHB's take:

Good thing the PHB father isn't in charge. 

This isn't the transformative PCMH break-through, and if CMS is looking to bend the cost curve, these one year results suggest Ms. Burwell et al are going to have to look elsewhere.

That being said, it's possible that years 2, 3 and 4 will show savings.  Even if that's true, the PHB wishes CMS and the health system "good luck" in being able to execute anything outside of fiscal year blocks of time.  We'll see.

The good news? The PHB suspects that the participating primary care sites ended up in the black.  They had already absorbed the costs of their EHRs and becoming PCMHs prior to the start of the initiative, so most of their $226,000 probably flowed right to their bottom lines.

As an aside, some of the $14 PBPM savings were attributed to a reduction in 30-day readmissions.  As the PHB understands it, CMS already has a methodology to claw that cost back from the health care system.  If that's true, the PCMH readmission savings are being double counted.

Image from Wikipedia

Health Policy Insights from the Medical Home Summit: Wellness, ACOs

The Opening Ceremony of
The Medical Home Summit

The Population Health Blog is back home after attending the intellectually rewarding Population Health Colloquium and Medical Home Summit.  It was great to reconnect with old colleagues and make new friends.

In no particular order, here are some PHB take-aways:

One representative from household-name health insurer spoke in a lofty plenary session on the merits of keeping patients healthy. While the PHB was inspired by the videos of device-wearing joggers, it all seemed eerily reminiscent of the wacky pharmaceutical company value-propositions from years ago. That's when these companies said that they weren't selling "pills" but "cures."  It remains to be seen if Humana's transition from pooling risk to promoting fitness will lead to a similarly unprofitable ending.

More than one smart policymaker expressed skepticism on-stage about the ability of Accountable Care Organizations to reduce costs or increase quality. Wow. The PHB suspects more ACO shoes are getting ready to drop inside the beltway. If that's correct, it seems the expert-class is not only reducing their exposure to the coming stinkbombs, but is retooling to get in on The Next Big Idea gravy train.

One compelling speaker suggested that truly "patient-centric" primary care medical homes should offer timely access, the ability to talk to the doctor by phone at any time and attentiveness to the social dimensions of their patients' needs while richly rewarding docs to provide high-value care to fewer patients.  When the PHB mused out loud that may be what precisely what Concierge/Direct Primary Care practices are doing, the reaction of the audience prompted momentary concern that it might get lynched. 

The looming repeal of the SGR was mentioned only in passing, suggesting that few believe that this latest legislative fix portends a renewed commitment to health care reform.  As the PHB understands it, the current proposal commits Medicare to a .5% increase in physician fees per year over the next five years. This reminds the PHB of a compromise it made when the Spouse countered that a loaded SUV was a better option than a loaded sedan.  We got the loaded SUV.

And the EHR wasn't mentioned at all, which kept the PHB from offering its novel twist on Ms. Clinton's Emailgate tempest. It's clear that the Secretary reasonably concluded that her State Department's email system was unable to meet her personal workflow electronic communication and documentation needs. Our nation's EHR-using physicians feel her pain and salute her for her approach to finding a workable solution. After the American Medical Association gives her a suitable award, they should ask her if they can expect that same commitment to innovative health information technology solutions when she wins the White House.

Image from Wikipedia
         

Health Care Cost Insights and Capitation for the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH)

The Population Health Blog finally caught up with the Oct 22/29 "Price, Cost and Competition" issue of JAMA. 

One of the more interesting articles was a Viewpoint editorial on the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH). After tut-tuting fee-for-service payment as antithetical to meaningful payment reform, the author admits what the PHB has been saying all along: a global payment that covers all the medical, coordinating as well as non-physician services of the PCMH is tantamount to old fashioned "capitation." As we learned in the 1990s, capitation's unintended consequences are a) signing up too many patients, b) limiting access to primary care and c) over-referring to specialists.  To counter that, the editorial's author suggests the PCMH movement seeks "accountability." 

We'll see about that.

In the meantime, some other interesting articles:

Are "for-profit" hospitals evil?  Not necessarily.....

237 hospitals that converted from not-for-profit to for-profit anytime between 2003 and 2010 were compared to 631 hospitals that had not converted.  Converting hospitals improved their financial margins (practically all were in the red and subsequently became break-even) vs. the comparison group, and did so without increased utilization, restricting access to care, higher death rates or declines in quality for their Medicare patients. Their path to profitability may have been lined by renegotiated commercial insurance contracts, cutting costs or moving non-performing assets off the balance sheet.

Can physician groups become monopolistic? In a word, yes.

Commercial insurance preferred provider organization (PPO) charges for ten types of physician office visits in ten different specialties across 50 states were correlated with a measure of local market dominance dubbed the "Hirschman-Herfindahl Index" (more on that here).  As the HHI index increased, payments also increased, suggesting that as much as additional $3 to $12 in fees for the same services were the result of monopolistic contracting.

Monopolies aside, if docs are in charge vs. the hospitals, can they reduce health care costs?  Also yes.

This study compared average "per-patient expenditures" of physician-owned versus hospital-owned integrated medical groups and independent practice associations in California from 2009 to 2012. Among the 158 groups, 118 were owned by docs; their expenditures were over a thousand dollars less compared to hospital owned groups.  Larger physician groups had higher expenditures than the smaller ones.  More on that in a future post.

Does price transparency help patients chose to spend less?

Over 500,000 insurance plan enrollees had special on-line access to prices for medical services prior to using them.  There were over 250,000 households and of these, approximately 7500 accessed the information. Compared to households that didn't check the information, the price-shoppers seemed to choose cheaper labs (a few dollars per test) and imaging options (about a hundred dollars per test).  In looking at the data, the DMCB suspects some may have also deferred testing by choosing to use them less frequently or not at all.

The Most Interesting Man In the World Teaches the PHB about the Medical Home

The Population Health Blog isn't sure why its Twitter account was targeted by the Dos Equis ads about the exploits of "the world's most interesting man." Tweets on how "His grandmother uses his family recipes!" and "Fish fight for his bait!" tempted the PHB succumb to Twitter followership.

Which naturally prompted the debonair PHB to ponder the exploits of the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH).

To wit:

The White House wants to throw the bus under the PCMH.

Health insurers like it when the PCMH loses money.

The PCMH sues malpractice attorneys.

Ezekiel Emanuel wants be enrolled in a PCMH after he turns 75.

Biker pediatricians have tattoos that say "PCMH."

When they encounter a PCMH, actuaries stop counting.

PCMH jargon about smart device apps has led to the creation of a PMCH jargon app.

"PCMH" is how "ACO" is successfully spelled.

The most interesting man in the world is enrolled in a PCMH

The PHB invites other exploits.

Stay healthy, my friends.

CMS Succumbs to Disease Management Style Spin?

If, thanks to the medical home or disease management, you've witnessed the improvements in patients' care, you've also probably been frustrated by those silly skeptics' insistence on validation. But for traditional research designs, statistical significance, valid comparators and publication in obscure scientific journals, the face validity of nurse-led care management for high risk patients could have ushered in a new era in primary care.

Darn those academic-actuary-statistician-weenies! And double darn CMS for falling for them and not funding the medical home and disease management!

Which is why Population Health Blog readers may enjoy this bit of peer-review schadenfreude. It appears a recent CMS pronouncement that its own "Partnership for Patients Program" prevented early elective deliveries and reduced readmissions is highly suspect, thanks to "a weak design, a lack of valid metrics, and a lack of external peer review for its evaluation." 

Yikes.

It appears the amateurs at CMS used a pre-post design, selected start and stop evaluation points to gin up the outcomes, relied on imperfect administrative data and never bothered with having its outcomes validated by independent review. As a result, we really don't know if the billion of dollars that went into PPP did any good at all.

The PHB appreciates the point. Scientific discipline and peer review go a long way making sure that consumers are getting their money's worth. Now that CMS has gone from an agnostic payer to the centerpiece of health reform, there's a huge risk that its bureaucrats will succumb to shortcuts and spin.

Taxpayers deserve better.  And so do patients.

Image from Wikipedia

The Cost-Saving Elevator-Pitch for the Patient Centered Medical Home

Ready, set, elevator, go!

Over the last year, several colleagues have asked the Population Health Blog to compactly summarize the economic return for the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH).

Here's the PHB's elevator speech: 

The PCMH comes down to two distinct - and separate - propositions:

1. "Reduce avoidable costs" by only applying the team-based care management and coordination to persons with all three of the following: a) chronic illness who b) are at high risk for future claims and c) are amenable to change.*  All three must be present. This cohort typically represents a small, but "high return potential" fraction of a population.
 
The temptation is to blanket all patients with medical home resources, which increases program as well as claims costs and does little to bend the total cost curve.  The "disease management" industry learned about "care creep" the hard way.

2. "Increase value" by enhancing quality and/or the experience of care with a modest - and relatively affordable - increases in costs. The relative increase in quality/experience is greater than the corresponding increase in program and claims costs, and represents a good deal for the health care dollar.

The temptation is to believe that quality/experience improvements lead to lower costs.  Once again, the "disease management" industry learned about this the hard way. 

* By the way, if the elevator ride is long, the PHB recommends pointing out that 1) predictive modeling/risk stratification can find the high risk persons and that 2) "change" includes modifying patient behaviors.

Image from Wikipedia

The Patient Centered Medical Home PCMH Gets On Base with Increased Quality in the Real World

Getting to first base

Advocates for the Patient Centered Medical Home will probably like what they see in the lead research article in the June 3 Annals of Internal Medicine.

The Population Health Blog likes it too.  But first, let's look at the study itself.

The Taconic Independent Practice Association participated in a multi-commercial insurer medical home program.  For each patient enrolled in an NCQA Level 3 primary care home, the IPA was offered $2 to $10 per patient per month. 

Since not all of the 675 IPA practices created medical homes in the 2008-2010 time frame, researchers were able to compare the quality of care for the approximately 27,000 patients attributed to the medical homes versus the approximately 64,000 patients attributed to usual care settings.  While they were at it, they also evaluated the quality impact of having an electronic health record (all medical home practices had one, but not all users of electronic health records were medical homes) vs. having a paper record. Quality was determined by examining a subset of NCQA-based measures of recommended routine screening tests and care of persons with diabetes, asthma and (for children) pharyngitis.

While the impact of being in a medical home was not a home run, it definitely got on base.

Over the three years of the study, the medical home practices' measures diverged from the other two groups by an average of a 7% vs. paper and 6% vs. EHR.  While none of the practices hit 100%, and not all of the differences were statistically significant, if an EHR-based clinic was able to hit (for example) a "72%" quality measure, the medical home was"79%" (mammogram screening). 

As one more gauge of its impact, as time went on, the spread of the data grew over time as medical homes outpaced the usual care practices.

The authors correctly point out that the study was observational and that there could be hidden factors other than the presence or absence of a medical home that could be biasing the data.  While the authors did everything they could to statistically "neutralize" the impact of unequally distributed patient or practice factors, the study process is not perfect.

This was also in a commercial insurance setting.  We don't know if Medicare patients would gain the same benefit.

The PHB will also point out that the NCQA's one-size-fits-all measures are intermediate in nature and are imperfectly tied to long term outcomes.  They also fail to account for patient preferences.

On the other hand, the PHB likes this because it was a huge "real world" study involving hundreds of clinical practices taking care of tens of thousands of patients over three years. It helps the PHB put things in perspective by showing that the team-based care management of the medical home can have a discernible impact on quality.

Unfortunately, there is nothing on the cost of care. The PCMH is still struggling to prove that it "saves" money; the PHB says health care consumers will get what they pay for and - aside from a selected high-risk subpopulation - the medical home offers high value at a reasonable additional cost.  The commercial insurers got their money's worth from the Taconic IPA.

While the authors don't specifically call it out, there doesn't appear to have been a large impact by the EHR on the quality of care in the real world.  Compared to practices with paper records, the impact of the EHR seemed to be scant.

More JAMA Drama: The Medical Home Reduces Costs, But Only For High Risk Patients

A medical home
candidate?

Just when the Population Health Blog decided to take a break from all the JAMA drama, along comes this study "Medical Homes and Cost and Utilization Among High-Risk Patients" that was just published in American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC).

It cannot resist.

As readers will recall, the offending JAMA article described how a large three year-long Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) multi-payer pilot involving approximately 64,000 patients failed to reduce health care costs or increase quality. The pilot program was called the "Chronic Care Initiative" (CCI), and was the brainchild of then Governor Rendell's reform-minded "Prescription for Pennsylvania."

In the AMJC study, 6940 "intervention" patients with a) at least 3 months of primary care physician follow-up, plus b) at least 6 months of assignment to one of the medical home practices were retrospectively compared to 6940 similar "control" patients from a single non-participating practice. The control patients were matched using "DxCG" risk adjustment software* that was combined with propensity matching.

Pediatric practices were excluded, as were outlier patients with more than $100,000 in medical expenses.

In addition to looking at those patients, the top 10% of risk DxCG patients from the medical home (654 patients) were compared to matched high-risk non-medical home practices (734 patients). 

The analysis was complicated by the later attainment of NCQA medical home recognition among some clinics that were taking some of the control patients.  This limited the pool of patients in the 3rd year to just over a thousand in both arms, and just over 100 patients in the high risk groups.

Results?

There was no difference in the evolution of health care costs among all patients included in the analysis.  This confirmed the JAMA drama.

But......

For the top 10% high-risk patients, there were reductions of 61, 48 and 94 hospitalizations per thousand over each of the three years study. This was accompanied by a difference of the per member per month (PMPM) inpatient costs of $115 and $62 in years 1 and 2.  While there was also an increase in outpatient specialist visits, the downward change in inpatient utilization drove the difference in combined overall costs in years 1 and 2 of $107 and $75 PMPM. 

All these differences were statistically significant.  The 3rd year was not because there were too few patients to achieve statistical significance.

While the study was retrospective, the matching methodology is credible enough for the peer reviewers of AJMC and for the PHB. Using control patients from just one clinic is problematic, but no study is perfect. 

Which brings us to the punchlines:

1. Two years ago, the prescient Population Health Blog described how modern Ver. 2.0 "disease" (better described as "population") health management can financially succeed.  It said that one key ingredient is risk segmenting the population and targeting services at the highest risk patients. This AJMC article says it was right.  Most patients won't benefit, but vulnerable patients will.  They are the PCMH's customer.

2. The AMJC article also comports with an accompanying JAMA editorial that is discussed here.  As the PHB quoted, the JAMA drama....

".... has done a great service for the advocates of the Patient Centered Medical Home by effectively ending promotion of this care model as a generic, low-level, unselective approach to health care delivery for all.  The next critical phase of PCMH development should focus on its strategic deployment for the care of high-utilization patients...."

* This uses "linear additive formulas obtained from ordinary least squares regression to combine expenses associated with clinical groups and demographic factors to generate predictions." Wasn't that easy?

Ten Things to Know About the mHealth App Ecosystem.

A mHealth app walled garden:
enter at your own risk?

If, like the Population Health Blog, you're interested in the hand-held mHealth app ecosystem, you may want to check out this just published JAMA review article "In Search of a Few Good Apps." 

Naturally, for time-pressed readers who'd rather not read it all, your PHB is happy to provide this ten point summary.

1) There are more than 40,000 of mHealth apps and the industry is still in its infancy.

2) Despite their faddish sexiness, there is very little hard evidence that many of the commercially available apps to lead to measurable improvements in clinical or economic outcomes. However, some of the underlying technology (such as pedometers) does provide a benefit.

3) The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will assert its regulatory authority if the app "acts" like a "medical device" or as an accessory to a "medical device." Logging data, retrieving content or communicating won't be regulated, but medication dosing guides or the provision of diagnostic information will be.

4) 3) Little is known about the physician prescribing patterns for apps.  We also haven't figured out if or how a patient's access to an app should depend on a licensed professional's approval/prescription.

5) There is a possibility that many currently available apps are putting users' privacy at risk.

6) Little is known about apps' compatibility with electronic health records (EHRs).  This may be less of an "ecosystem" and more a bunch of isolated "walled gardens."

7) One vulnerability to any app's usefulness is data overload. Hundreds of food entries, for example, may do little to increase user insight about his or her diet.

8) Other than the FDA and its fussing over apps' medical "deviceness", there is no agency or entity that provides certification for apps. Consumers are on their own, based largely on on-line reviews and word of mouth.  One organization tried to do it and conspicuously failed.

9) The time is right to create "guidelines" for app developers, such as how to provide useful data summaries as well as visual displays, maximize patient safety, ensure information accuracy and protect consumer privacy.

10) The time is also right for funding agencies to support research on apps, especially for persons with chronic illness.

Naturally, the PHB offers commentary:

It remains to be seen if the FDA can keep up, especially with apps that are in the "grey zone" between offering advice/possibilities vs. diagnosis/treatment. That shortcoming is vulnerable to overlawyering and regulatory overreach. That means prolonged time to market, increased uncertainty, hampered innovation and the threat of retroactive and potentially capricious reviews.

As you are reading this, many apps are undoubtedly being developed by the population health service providers.  It may be time for entities like the Population Health Alliance or stakeholder organized medicine organizations to take the lead in establishing app benchmarks, best practices and guidelines.  If they don't lead on this, someone will do it to them. 

While vendors that offer apps along with their coaching may be inclined to regard them as proprietary and shield them from the scrutiny of peer review research, apps that are proven to improve outcomes will ultimately rise to the top.  It's not just the funding agencies but the companies that offer these apps that have a stake in "proving it," while also advancing medical knowledge for the betterment of all of us.

Finally, wouldn't it be neat if there was a generic mHealth app that could be used by medical homes to facilitate nurse-patient coaching, link the patient to the EHR and enhance communication with providers?  If there is one that the PHB isn't aware of, it wants to know about it.

Image from Wikipedia

A Generic Keyword "Pitch" to Better Sell the Medical Home

Applause!

While the just concluded 2014 Medical Home Summit was a wonderful learning and networking confab, it did have it's moments of jargon-laced salesmanship.

Think mixing two parts suspect data with one part dubious claims and a helping of preordained conclusions, bake with PowerPoint and serve to a fawning audience with a garnish of sweeping generalizations. And the dessert?  Applause.

Naturally, some of the Population Health Blog's evidence-based colleagues fussed over the occasional spills of snake oil. The PHB isn't at all concerned, because it was taught years ago by the old disease management industry that even the most pristine research in the most elite journals gets spun.

And let's face it: we collectively crossed that Rubicon when the Mr. Obama sold us a health insurance reform program that promised we could keep our doctors.

Since we all gotta make a living, the PHB is pleased to offer a free service to its more honest, non-for-profit and spin-challenged colleagues. It has combined its trove of disease management nostrums with a list of medical home keywords (underlined) that appeared in many of the Summit's presentations and huckstered over cheese and wine during the Exhibit Hall receptions:

Our (insert name of your medical home program) is a transformative and population-based initiative that shifts health care delivery from volume to value that proves that that JAMA article (link here) was wrong. Our transparency is only matched by our EHR registry and teaming of physicians, nurse practitioners, social workers, office staff, clerks, temps and janitorial service workers and we (pick one: have been, will be or should be) the subject of a (pick one: grant or report) by (pick one or more: PCPCC, the Commonwealth Fund, AHRQ, Medical Home News) that further shows why JAMA was woefully mistaken.

By proactively focusing on impactful care coordination and reducing care gaps, engagement of both patients and primary care providers drives triple-aim outcomes that include (insert percent numbers here without p values), which further demonstrates the JAMA article is a despicable outlier.

Our savings, enhanced clinical outcomes, decreases in readmissions, improved patient care experience and betterment of the community show that (name of medical home program) is foundational to the success of accountable care, which is why JAMA sucks.

As a result, we conclude that (pick one or more: politicians, employers) (pick one: wisely have or definitely should) require commercial and government insurers to pay (pick one or more: millions, specialists less, or through the nose) to save primary care despite what JAMA says.

Noise to Signal Ratio in the Assessment of the Medical Home

From time to time, the Population Health Blog's consulting business generates supplemental income.  When that happens, it gets dropped into the PHB's cash flow and life goes on.

Months later, is the PHB household better off?  On one hand, every little bit helps.  On the other, total income is the result of many jobs and total well-being is only partially a function of the PHB's bank account.  In other words, it's difficult to gauge the one time contribution of a consulting gig to the "outcome" of total income.

It's a classic "noise" (total income) to "signal" (the gig) conundrum.

That's how the PHB addressed the problem of this disappointing JAMA article in its conversations with colleagues at today's Medical Home Summit meeting.  As readers will recall, this JAMA research showed no statistically significant impact on claims expense for all patients who were attributed to a medical home clinic compared to a parallel population of patients attributed to non-medical home clinics.
 
To the PHB, "total claims expense" is akin to total income, while the impact on a smaller subpopulation segment of patients with chronic conditions who were at special risk is the "gig."  Because of the overwhelming "noise" of insurance claims involving tens of thousands of patients, it's practically impossible to discern the benefit of the medical home for the smaller number of vulnerable patients.

The lesson?  While all patients assigned to a medical home clinic won't benefit, some could.  Until we understand that, we won't really know the return on investment of this approach to care. 

Smart MedPAC Wonks Think Out Loud About the Medical Home

If you spend a lot of time building, administering, expanding, marketing, promoting or networking "medical homes," it might be a good idea for you to read this MedPAC meeting transcript.

As Population Health Blog readers know, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission advises Congress on how to best run Medicare, which includes the thorny issue of how to pay physicians who care for Medicare beneficiaries. During their March 6 meeting, the Commissioners discussed how to replace the primary care bonus program that is set to expire at the end of 2015.

By the way: The 10% bonus in 2012 amounted to $664 million for approximately 200,000 providers caring for 21 million beneficiaries.  That means, thanks to Uncle Sam, average participating docs got another $3400 in yearly income.  For PHB readers who are familiar with the per-member-per-month metric, that amounts to $2.60 PMPM.  As of 2014, there is still no hard information on whether the bonus resulted in any improvement in access, quality or outcomes.  In fact, despite the bonus, there is preliminary data that 28% of Medicare beneficiaries have had trouble finding a primary care provider.

As the PHB understands it, the bonus program was funded with additional fee-for-service money for primary care services.  Since that's going away at the end of next year, the Commission considered whether to continue it as is, or to reengineer it as a medical home payment system.

The transcript on whether to pay for medical homes reflects a wandering discussion with no final consensus. That being said, there were some interesting takeaways from a group of policy wonks who've spent a lot of time thinking about this approach to care:

Budget Neutral Bad News: While you may argue that the medical home "saves money" in excess of the fees used to pay for it, no one at MedPAC believes the additional funding will continue.  That means the $664 million after 2015 will likely have to come from budget-neutral reductions in payments for other medical services.  In zero-sum terms, that means someone (specialists?) has to lose in order for the medical home to win.

Definition: While there was admiration for the National Committee on Quality Assurance recognition program for medical homes, Commission members wondered whether that recognition translates into value. Would a "leaner" model be more cost effective?  And, if Medicare favored a non-NCQA leaner medical home structure, how would it be implemented?  It providers had to apply for it, should they subject to an audit?

Attribution: Figuring out which doc among several should be paid for medical home services isn't easy.  There was little appetite for having beneficiaries sign an attestation, while a claims analysis would have to be done using a "look-back" based on Medicare billing patterns.  That would result in a one year payment delay.

Whither Primary Care: There was doubt that an additional income stream of $2.60 PMPM would be enough to incent medical students to shun higher paying specialty careers.

Generalizability: There was some doubt on whether the medical home works outside of integrated delivery settings. 

More Bad News On The Way?: One Commissioner also works as an editor at a top tier medical journal, and he hinted that more negative manuscripts on the medical home are being submitted for publication.

What Wasn't Said: The Population Health Blog was surprised that MedPAC did not address:

1) the concept that the medical home should be directed at a subpopulation of patients most likely to benefit (raised in this "one size does not fit all" editorial), or

2) that getting the Medicare bureaucracy to introduce a new complex payment mechanism may be far more easier said than done (and that's according to White House insider Dr. Emanuel)

More on the Failure of a Huge Medical Home Initiative to Reduce Health Care Costs

Getting the medical home back on the road

In this JAMA editorial, Thomas Schwenk agrees with the Disease Management/ Population Health Blog that the recent negative report on the medical home may have been the result of the lack of any risk stratification.

Recall that this negative report, Association Between Participation in a Multipayer Medical Home intervention and changes in Quality, Utilization and Costs of Care, compared three years' worth of clinical and economic outcomes for 32 community-based medical home clinics vs. those from 29 similar non-medical home clinics.  Claims expense, ER visit frequency, hospitalization rates and 10 out of 11 HEDIS measures were no different between the two groups.

He points out that this study....

.... has done a great service for the advocates of the Patient Centered Medical Home by effectively ending promotion of this care model as a generic, low-level, unselective approach to health care delivery for all.  The next critical phase of PCMH development should focus on its strategic deployment for the care of high-utilization patients...."

The DMCB couldn't have said it better.  The medical home should be "aimed" at patients who are most likely to benefit.

Upon further reflection, it would add two other comments:

1. Another under-recognized feature of successful population health systems is the central administration (and employment) of the non-physician care managers who are peripherally distributed throughout the primary care network.  Here's one example as well as another that suggests the central model has a better track record.

In other words, this study showed multiple independently functioning "stand-alone" medical homes is equal to the sum of its parts.

2. The study also, by the way, calls into question the return on investment of achieving NCQA Medical Home recognition.  While it's possible that it's ultimately necessary, it would appear that just having it doesn't mean a health system will save money or improve quality.

Image from Wikipedia

A Huge Medical Home Pilot Fails: the Pennsylvania Chronic Care Initiative

Back in 2007, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell created the "Chronic Care Management Reimbursement and Cost Reduction Commission."  Months later, the Commission presented its strategic plan to the Governor, which then led to the Pennsylvania Chronic Care Initiative (PACCI). The "Rx for PA" was launched, promoting the medical home as a means of increasing quality and lowering costs for Pennsylvanians with diabetes and pediatric asthma.

The Commission recognized that one of the problems with the medical home was that not all health insurers covered its services the same way.  That left the primary care practices with the dilemma of having to offer different services to different patients depending on insurance status.  As only big Ed Rendell could do in his "discussions" with the Commonwealth's health insurers, the PACCI "leveled" the playing field by getting Medicaid and the dominant Pennsylvania health insurers to similarly "cover" the medical home. This minimized - outside of Medicare - the impact of multiple insurers with different benefit and coverage standards.

The PACCI was a statewide, multipayer medical home pilot that was started in southeast portion of the state.  It started in June of 2008 involved six health plans (3 commercial and 3 Medicaid) that agreed to give NCQA-recognized clinics additional yearly practice support payments and other bonuses.

Three years later, 32 out of 34 of the originally selected southeast Pennsylvania practices completed the pilot, of which 6 were independently managed by nurse practitioners; at the end, about half had achieved high "Level 3: NCQA status. 

The PACCI clinics and their approximately 64,000 patients were compared to a parallel group of 29 comparison practices that were similar in size, specialty and patient mix; they had approximately 56,000 patients.  Of the six health plans, only four could supply claims data that went back to 2007.

Results?  The article is here, but the short version is as follows:

Using 2007 as the baseline, there was no difference in any change in hospitalization rates, ED visit rates, primary care visits, visits to specialists or overall costs of care. In fact, the medical home clinics had MORE "ambulatory sensitive" hospitalizations. 

Ouch.

Of 11 HEDIS® quality measures (blood sugar testing and control, cholesterol testing and control, monitoring for kidney or eye disease in diabetes, childhood asthma treatment, plus the health maintenance chlamydia screening and breast, cervical and colon cancer testing) only the kidney monitoring was statistically significantly improved compared to the non-pilot clinic populations.

Double ouch.

The DMCB's take:

This is bad news for the medical home community. While the methodology is not pristine (the clinics were not randomly assigned, opening the possibility of bias and some of the data were not available), this is a real world study that should have detected some cost savings or quality improvement. Instead, none were found. 

The DMCB and AHRQ have worried about this before, but the DMCB remains open minded:

Medical home is necessary but not sufficient? The authors points out that there were no other economic incentives to reduce costs and that there was no feedback on performance.  The DMCB agrees that had the practices known which patients were at greatest risk, they might have been able to better target their services.  In other words, medical homes may be more likely to succeed if they are paired with predictive modeling to proactively identify and intervene on their patients who were most likely to have ambulatory-sensitive hospitalizations

Not really "all payer." As the DMCB understands it, Medicare was not a participant in PACCI, and its failure to cover medical home services could have repressed its complete adoption throughout the practice.  Small wonder, since Medicare can account for half of a doctor's income.

Generalizability to small physician-owned practices? Medical homes arguably work in "closed" integrated or Medicaid care systems.  It may be that the sum of smaller independent practices is equal to all its uncoordinated parts.

Nurse practitioners? It sure would be nice to know how the nurse practitioner-led PACCI practices fared vs. physicians.

Image from Wikipedia

Insights on Health Reform, Courtesy of Medical Home News

Getting more brainy

To the chagrin of the DMCB spouse, the Disease Management Care Blog serves for free on several editorial boards. In its estimation, it's well worth the time.  It's closer to breaking news, has met interesting colleagues, gets to read interesting manuscripts and has one more excuse to take a pass on sharing in the intensely engaging drama of Downton Abbey.

One such publication is Medical Home News, and the latest edition, thanks to a back-page "Catching Up With...." interview with former Deloitte executive Paul Keckley, did not disappoint. The DMCB has seen Dr. Keckley's smarts in person in several venues and the MHN piece did not disappoint. When he opines, the DMCB thinks.

Among his brainy insights....

The struggle to prove that the medical home saves money continues not only because there are many models serving many populations with many metrics.  In addition, "each prominent medical home promotes its model as uniquely effective."  The DMCB saw how pride of ownership and proprietary business models balkanized the early disease management industry.  PCMH advocates, you've been warned.

In "some form" ACOs will survive.  The road from where-we-are to where-we-need-to-be will need to include skills in managing populations on a "risk basis." If that's true, the DMCB provocatively wonders if that means that that ACO "form" will be some sort of HMO, which was very good at manging populations on a risk basis.  Time will tell.

The three things getting in the way of "value-based" care are 1) operational and infrastructure costs, 2) payer-provider agreement on how savings will be shared and 3) "the regulatory framework in the ACA and future laws that will define fair play in value-based purchasing."  At first glance, thinks the DMCB, makes sense until it ponders the irony of that 3rd one.

"Tranparency about prices means little."  It's all about networks, reference pricing and leveraging them to extract value.  The DMCB cannot disagree and is reminded that's how health care markets really work.

The biggest disappointment in health reform is how disconnected the consumer remains, while the biggest plus has been the advent of data-driven health care.  The DMCB wonders if the biggest disappointment has been the battering of the "big government" brand, while another plus has been the growth of the DMCB readership.  Time, naturally, will tell.

Image from Wikipedia

The Office Manager: A Member of the Patient Centered Medical Home Team You Never Heard Of

Which one is the practice manager?

Ask the average primary health care policy wonk about the make-up of the Patient Centered Medical Home team and you're likely to get an elevator speech that includes some or all of the key words "pharmacists,"" social workers," "nurse care managers," "nurse practitioners," "physician assistants," "dieticians," "health educators," "respiratory therapists," "psychologists" or "navigators." 

If that's all you hear, tell that wonk they only know part of the story.

That's what the Disease Management Care Blog discovered when it was preparing for its talk at the upcoming CME Start Ratings Master Class Conference that will be held Dec 9-10 in Fort Lauderdale.

It turns out that every primary care office ultimately has one person charged with making sure that the office "workflows" are running smoothly.  When patients register, use the waiting room, have their vital signs and medications reviewed, are asked about pain, are prompted to share other concerns, are moved to the examining room and subsequently get checked out with a follow-up appointments or referrals, there is a maestro in the background charged with making sure the trains run on time.

Meet the office practice manager, the hidden part of the health care team who you never heard of.

In case you think they don't matter, think again.  They have their own trade association and are making their opinions known when it comes to health reform. If a health insurer or practice association needs the primary care clinic to implement a "medical home," you can be sure that it will be up to the practice manager to make it happen.  You ignore that person at your care-coordination peril.

The message for insurers, delivery systems and population health service providers is that physician buy-in is very necessary, but may not be sufficient.  After the doc says OK, medical home advocates would be well advised to find the practice manager and work closely with that individual.

Community Care North Carolina Style Medical Home Saves Money

So, does the medical home "save money?"  A recent publication in Population Health Management about Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC) says "yes." That's important, because CCNC program has had more than its fair share of controversy. 

You can read more about CCNC here.  According to the Commonwealth Fund, Raleigh pays CCNC's 14 non-profit regional networks $3 per member per month (PMPM) for medical home services for over a million Medicaid and CHIP beneficiaries. In exchange, the 1300 clinics provide preventive care services, 24 hour coverage services, coordinating access to specialty services, care management and quality improvement. To do all that, CCNC uses a "medical home model" with "specialized chronic care programs" staffed by teams of docs, pharmacists and care managers.

The quasi-experimental evaluation published in PHM used "hierarchical modeling" to evaluate the impact of CCNC on two different samples of non-elderly (ages 0 to 64) disabled Medicaid patients who had no other insurance:

Model 1: compared the medical home patients' claims expense within and outside the enrollment periods "after controlling for other covariate values"

Model 2 created matched cohorts of enrolled and non-enrolled patients to compare pre-post differences in insurance claims expense. Matching was based on pre-enrollment pharmacy use, race, age, enrollment duration, clinical risk and behavioral health burdens.  For every enrolled patient, ten non-enrolled comparison patients were selected. 

The study period was January 1 2007 through Sept. 30, 2011.  Any single months of disenrollment were "filled in" if there was enrollment 2 months per and 2 months post. 

Results?

Model 1: This used insurance claims data for over 169,000 patients with an average age of 35 years. 52% were male with a 24% rate of mental illness and an 8% rate of chemical dependency. Compared to the time of not being enrolled in a program, claims expense was statistically significantly $190 per member per month (PMPM) cheaper in the first year; that declined to $64 PMPM cheaper in the last ear of study.  Persons with a higher burden of illness had even greater savings.

Model 2: This studied claims from approximately 102,000 enrolled patients with pretty much the same baseline characteristics in Model 1. Savings achieved statistical significance in the 3rd, 4th and 5th years of study: $81, $73 and $121 PMPM, respectively.

The DMCB's take:

While it can get lost in the sublime minutiae of hierarchical modeling, the DMCB finds the methodology and the numbers to be credible.  It has used the same Model 2 style of matching in its own studies. Since a pristinely conducted prospective randomized control clinical study is functionally impossible in a state-wide Medicaid program, quasi-experimental study designs like this are a good window into figuring out what happened.

And what happened is that they saved a lot of money. Assuming CCNC was paid $3 PMPM or $36 million per year for a about a million beneficiaries, avoided claims expense appeared to be well north of that.

While CCNC has a lot of moving pieces, the DMCB believes the key success factor was based on identifying the most vulnerable patients and then using nurses to intervene on the them.

The average caseload per nurse ranges from 150 to 200 patients.  As the Commonwealth Fund summary describes.....

"Case managers... work with primary care providers (“medical homes”) to identify patients who will benefit most from targeted care management interventions, such as patients making repeated ER visits; patients diagnosed with asthma, diabetes, or heart failure; and patients who have two or more chronic conditions (including mental health conditions) with high service use or activity limitations indicating complex care needs. Care managers identify high-risk patients through the CMIS and from case-identification lists provided by the CCNC central office, notifications of admissions provided by hospitals, and physician referrals."

CCNC is to be congratulated for moving from opaque actuarial studies to the harsh glare of peer-reviewed publications.  While some critics may pounce on some of the weaknesses inherent in any retrospective analysis of subpopulations, the observations from two "Model 1 and Model 2" vantage points  are sufficiently positive to believe that North Carolina's taxpayers got their money's worth.

The DMCB would point out two caveats:

The disabled Medicaid beneficiary population is a notoriously high utilization group that is a classic example of the return on investment from "low hanging fruit." A little coordination goes a long way in a population with a baseline of high utilization.  The same approach may not work in other populations with different patterns of claims expense.

Unfortunately, this gives us little insight about the potential impact of a similar medical home model in commercially insured populations or among Medicare beneficiaries.  That's doubly true for fee-for-service beneficiaries who are outside of any managed care networks.