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

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

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?

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

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.

Just Because You Build It They Won't Come: What ACOs, PCMHs and Population Health Advocates Need to Know About Poverty and Emergency Room Use

Thinking about an ER visit.....

As part of a research requirement that it had to fulfill prior to medical school graduation, the young Disease Management Care Blog conducted a patient satisfaction survey. To its surprise, the DMCB discovered patients cared less about high touch primary care and more about access to high tech specialists.

It naturally ignored the income implications and became a general internist.

Fast forward to its job as a Medical Director in a not-for-profit physician-led managed care insurance plan.  No matter how much we "polished" the primary care network, emergency room utilization remained persistently high.

The CEO naturally ignored the DMCB's conclusion that there was little that could be done and assigned another medical director to the task.

Fast forward to Uncle Sam's Healthcare Fantasy Land, where ACOs and medical homes caring for patients with universal insurance will, thanks to the enlightened efficiencies of primary care, save gazillions of dollars by steering patients away from emergency rooms and hospitals.

All three scenarios came together when the DMCB read some research by group of Philadelphia docs who wanted to better understand why patients with low socioeconomic status kept ending up in emergency rooms and hospitals.

Best of all, to do this, they used a novel methodology: they found some patients and.... asked!

Their report appears in the latest issue of Health Affairs.

64 hospitalized patients with low socioeconomic status were approached to participate in a "qualitative" research interview (here's one example of how it's done). The patients were selected because they had been hospitalized via the ER multiple times, were between the ages of 18-64 years, were uninsured or on Medicaid, lived in a poor ZIP-code region of the city. 24 said no, leaving 40 subjects who agreed to have their interviews recorded. A rigorous analysis followed, with two "coders" who listened to the recordings and independently developed themes or ideas. They then circled back to the patients for confirmation.

Two themes emerged:

1) Convenience/Access: Even if they have access to primary care, the emergency room and inpatient setting remains the more convenient option.  That's because walk-in is available 24/7 and all testing as well as specialty care is available during a one-time visit.  Zero dollar primary care co-pays don't make up for the hassle, time and expense of calling ahead for appointments, arranging transportation (even if vouchers through Medicaid are available) or being referred for separate testing as well as specialty consultation.

2) Technology: Based on personal experience with their primary care docs, the emergency rooms and hospitals were perceived to have more technically proficient providers who were better able to achieve the correct diagnosis and render the correct treatment in a timely fashion.

A subset of patients seemed to come from chaotic life circumstances. Those patients found hospitals offered what the researchers described as "respite" and social "support."

The presence of Medicaid insurance had little to do with the attitudes described above.

The DMCB's take:

While subjective qualitative research is viewed with disdain by researchers, policymakers and journal editors, occasionally, good studies like this comes along.  This article sheds important light on a potential Achilles heel of accountable care organizations (ACOs) as well as the patient centered medical home (PCMH).

That Achilles heel? Just because you build it, these 40 patients - and millions who live in poverty like them - won't come.

What's more, they are making rational decisions.

The authors point out that system solutions include co-locating multiple services (primary care, labs, x-rays and specialists), improving the quality of primary care and, when possible, mitigating any social challenges. The DMCB agrees, but is unaware of any ACOs or medical home initiatives that, outside of the usual process measures, specifically address these patients' special concerns.

The DMCB's suggestions:

Advocates for ACOs and the PCMH need to get real, lower expectations and recognize that a key solution to the problem of health care overutilization by persons in poverty is to stop politicians and health care leaders from medicalizing poverty. 

That being said, one possible solution for ACOs and PCMHs serving fragile patients with poverty is high intensity biopsychosocial intervention.  It sounds expensive but full time community-based care management with low case loads and lots of physician support may help ameliorate some of the dysfunction.  It's probably less expensive than all those hospitalizations.

Finally, this may be an opportunity for nimble population health management service providers.  If any are already out there serving this population, the DMCB would like to know about it.

Image from Wikipedia

It Costs How Much to Launch a Patient Centered Medical Home?

HOW much for the PCMH?!*

According to Drs. Gill and Bagley, writing in the Annals of Family Medicine, the costs of transforming a primary care practice to a Patient Centered Medical Home should be generously borne by "payers."

While wishful thinking about payers' deep pockets is not new, the article has some eye-opening data (with Disease Management Care Blog provided links) on just how much some or all of the elements of a PCMH cost:

a) $1850 per month per practice or $17,000 per physician,

b) $5,600 start-up then $2,200 per year related to the costs of reporting outcomes,

c) $117,000 per physician per year, and

d) up to approximately $15,000 per practice per year for a management facilitator. 

No wonder the DMCB's friends in academia want someone else to pay for it.

In the meantime, companies like this continue to offer a different business model. Instead of rebuilding and equipping an entire primary care practice for a croup-to-guts "transformation," population health (definition here) service providers focus on those patients who are at highest risk and provide a modular combination of in as well as outsourced services. While there is no head-to-head cost comparison of PH vs. PCMH, it would appear that the per patient approach of PH has a competitive pricing advantage.

Stocking up for
allergy season

And speaking of outsourced services, the DMCB joins its other colleagues in looking forward to EHR's "meaningful use" criteria go from being meaningless to being truly meaningful.

For an under-recognized example of just how meaningful things will become, check out this interesting blog posting that describes the use of cloud-based EHR-data to follow U.S. allergy statistics.

While the information is interesting on its own merits, think how these data could be used by savvy providers to match allergy "market demand" by "stocking" a "just-in-time" "inventory" of allergy-care services such as patient reminder campaigns (for those with allergy-provoked asthma, "be sure to use your peak flow meter!") extra condition-specific appointments ("your provider with allergy expertise can see you this morning!"), treatments slots (nebulizers and immunotherapy ready to go) and medications (OTCs and prescription meds for the in-house pharmacy).


*Image from Wikipedia

Care Management FTE: Check. Medical Home Training: Check. But Actually Use It In Patient Care? That's Another Story....

Months ago, the caffeine-addled Disease Management Care Blog reviewed with the spouse how to pre-set the kitchen coffee brewer for a pot of fresh coffee for the next morning. After listening politely to its earnest instructions, the DMCB spouse rarely set up the brewer.

Which is why the DMCB wasn't surprised by an Iowa Chronic Care Consortium (ICCC) study of how its newly minted medical home coach trainees were being deployed in the real world. The ICCC is a not-for profit organization that was founded in 2002 and offers a training program that prepares health professionals to be members of a medical home team.
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The Consortium surveyed 318 graduates from their program. Of that number, there were 164 responses, yielding a 54% response rate. 83% of the respondents were nurses, while the remainder were medical or office assistants, diabetes educators, dietitians, social workers, physicians, pharmacists or administrators.
 
The good news is that care-management caffeine was available. The majority of respondents reported that they were using their skills to coach patients for self management, care coordination, planning visits and supporting registry use.  The majority also found their work professionally rewarding.

The bad news is that these professionals were not being supported for maximum effect:

55% were still "building support for the position."

48% reported that "office work" was given a "higher priority," often due to physician and administrator resistance.

73% reported that their coaching duties were part time and was in addition to their more traditional roles.

Only 8% were involved in office "change management."

Only 11% enjoyed a pay differential that rewarded their coaching skills.

The Consortium's paper concludes - paralleling the DMCB's coffee-making travails - that a good idea accompanied by well-meaning training is not enough to overcome established clinic routines, business roles and local culture.  The authors recommend that provider payments "change," coaching functions be "operationalized," training programs be "advanced," outcomes be "demonstrated" and that roles be "clarified."

While the DMCB ponders coffee change, operations, advances, demonstrations and clarifications, the DMCB has a far more more fundamental concern for the medical home:

With friends like this, the fledgling medical home movement doesn't need any enemies.

If the clinics that took the time and the money to train these individuals are unable to leverage their skills, disappointing outcomes could end up snatching usual care from the jaws of primary care clinic transformation.

The DMCB has three recommendations:

History Repeats: Years ago, established "disease management" companies had to go on record and oppose start-ups that were offering "faux" telephonic patient counseling programs. The medical home and population health management community, including the PCPCC, likewise can't afford to have clinics going to market with diluted medical home programs that deliver empty process instead of hard outcomes.  All health care is local, and much of the buy-in for the medical home will ultimately be won or lost at that level.  Speak up!
 
Buyer Beware: Payers and insurers need to be wise to the possibility that having a trained health coach on staff with credentials is not the same as having a health coach on line with the patients. On site credentialing may be in necessary that includes review of policies, job descriptions, pay scales and staff interviews.

Build or buy: Primary care clinics need to know that when they buy patient counseling services from a population health management vendor, you get full time on a plug and play basis. That may be a better option for a clinic that is not prepared to both train and fully use an on-site health coach.