Pre-Holiday Update from the Multi-State Collaborative

December has been a busy month for the Multi-State Collaborative—and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). On December 20, CMS released the Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative (CPC) Third Annual Report with impact findings from the first three years of the initiative through the end of December 2015.  Key evaluation findings including the following:

• Combined results from all seven regions suggest that the initiative has generated savings in Medicare Part A and B expenditures.
• Evaluators found a significant decrease in emergency department visits, as well as a decrease in hospitalization rates that approached statistical significance.
• Some improvements in quality were noted.
• CPC stakeholders maintained their participation through the end of year three, with high commitment levels from primary care practices and payer partners.

The team at the CMS Innovation Center will continue to evaluate and learn from this initiative in order to inform the design and implementation of Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) moving forward.

Last week, CMS announced the second round of payer and practice solicitations for CPC+, which will broaden opportunities for primary care clinicians to join advanced alternative payment models. CPC+ Round 2 will allow for up to 10 additional regions, creating a total of 5,500 slots for practices across both CPC+ Round 1 and 2. Round 2 applications will be open to new payers in both new and existing CPC+ regions, and to new practices in new regions only. CMS plans to open the payer solicitation in February 2017, and following the region announcement in late spring, practices located in those regions will be able to apply in summer 2017. CPC+ Round 2 implementation will begin on January 1, 2018.

“As the current Medicare-led multi-payer primary care transformation programs finish at the end of the year, it is very exciting to see these encouraging CPC results,” says Lisa Dulsky Watkins, director of the Fund’s Multi-State Collaborative. “Primary care practices are soon going to be held to increasingly rigorous quality standards mandates by the federal law known as MACRA (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act). The increased opportunities for practices to participate in CPC+ through the Round 2 expansion are based on emerging evidence and allow more interested practices to be rewarded for delivering improved care as they implement CPC+’s advanced alternate payment model.”

The Multi-State Collaborative supports the development and implementation of multi-payer primary care practice transformation since 2009.

See the CPC+ website, press release and FAQ for more information.