CMS extends Next Generation deadline a year due to COVID-19
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Solutions has prolonged the deadline for the Subsequent Technology danger model for accountable care organizations for a yr owing to the coronavirus.
CMS also announced improvements to other alternate payment products to adjust for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Modifications involve mitigating losses for Subsequent Technology ACOs by the percentage of months in the community health and fitness crisis, allowing members of bundled payment products the selection to be excluded from payment reconciliation for 2020 and offering an chance for entities to enter Immediate Contracting with an April 1, 2021 start out date.
CMS is supplying a second spherical of apps to participate in the Immediate Contracting Product setting up in 2022.
CMS has nonetheless to release information on the application period for the April 2021 start out date.
ACOs also require far more depth about the model’s economic facets, this sort of as how shelling out benchmarks will be set and how populations will be danger modified, the Countrywide Association of ACOs said.
WHY THIS Matters
ACOs have been anxious about how COVID-19 will affect economic losses in their danger products.
Premier said the improvements had been urgently required relief for healthcare providers in state-of-the-art alternate payment products that bear a considerable total of danger.
CMS has been pushing ACOs to choose on far more danger, sooner, supplying the reward of qualifying as an state-of-the-art alternate payment model to meet up with the specifications of MACRA.
Subsequent Technology is an state-of-the-art ACO model of greatest danger.
The year’s extension presents Subsequent Gen ACOs an state-of-the-art APM to participate in for 2021. NAACOS said it hopes the additional yr will give CMS far more data on which to make the Subsequent Gen model long-lasting.
THE Greater Development
Subsequent Gen ACOs have successfully achieved the CMS Innovation Center’s goals of improving upon care top quality although reducing Medicare shelling out, the Countrywide Association of ACOs said. Subsequent Gen ACOs collectively saved $406 million in 2018 and $337 million in 2017.
ON THE File
“Likely forward, value-dependent care can help ensure healthcare resiliency,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a Well being Affairs blog site publish saying the improvements “By accepting value-dependent or capitated payments, providers are superior capable to temperature fluctuations in utilization, and they can target on trying to keep individuals healthful somewhat than seeking to increase the quantity of providers to ensure reimbursement. Value-dependent payments also give steady, predictable revenue — protecting providers from the economic affect of a pandemic.”
Premier said, “These improvements will permit members to stay in the products so that we do not drop progress in the motion to value-dependent care.”
Twitter: @SusanJMorse
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