services aimed at moving away from the fee for service system. medicare and medicaid services chief medical officer patrick conway was among the panelists who discussed the change at a talk hosted by the alliance for health reform and kaiser family foundation. this is an hour and a half. >> we're going to go head and get started. i'm marilyn serafini. i'm with the alliance for health reform. i would like to welcome you to today's briefing on payment and delivery system reforms in medicare. so today we're going to be looking at the evidence behind numerous experiments that are going on across the country to pay medical providers based on quality rather than the quantity of services. i would like to thank our supporter in this event, the kaiser family foundation and in particular our longtime partner,

tricia neuman. i wanted to let everybody know that you can tweet with us live with this event. you can tweet your questions. you may tweet your comments. for both the people in the room and also those who are joining us live on c-span. the hash tag is medicare demos. if you would like to access our speaker presentations and you are not in the room with us, you can find them on our website at w www.allhealth.org. i'm going to turn this over now to our partner tricia neuman who will tell us more about why we're here today. >> thank you, marilyn. it's great to be here. before we get started, i just want to congratulate you, marilyn, and sarah dash, wherever you may be, for taking over the helm of the alliance. we miss ed, but it's great to see you both new co-ceos.

so welcome. of course, you have been here for a while. i want to thank all of you for coming here today on behalf of the kaiser family foundation. i'm excited to be here. i think we're going to all learn quite a bit. as we focus on the progress of medicare payment and delivery system reforms. it wasn't long ago people talked about medicare as a static program. but things are changing pretty rapidly in traditional medicare. the long-standing concern that the main problem with medicare is that it only encouraged more and more care has really been changing, and changing at a fairly rapid clip as medicare is instilling more incentives for providers to do more, provide better care, to manage care and even potentially at a lower cost. so i'm here as you are all here to learn more about the progress

of these demonstrations. i think it's fair to say that we all have a lot to learn, not just about how they are today but how they will progress. sometimes these things do take time. but it's exciting to see so much change happening and so much energy behind the ongoing effort to improve medicare for the program but more importantly for the people who had covers. so thank you. >> great. okay. so i'm going to introduce our speakers. to my far right we have cristina bow cu bocutte. she's associate director on the medicare policy at kaiser family. she has had a number of positions. next to her is marilyn moon. she's institute fellow at the american institutes for research. marilyn is an economist. she's analyzed the medicare program in various capacity,

including for the congressional budget office. she's also served as a public trustee for the social security and medicare trust funds in the 1990s. to my immediate right is patrick conway. he is acting principal deputy administrator at the centers for medicare and medicaid services. and he is also the director of its center for medicare and medicaid innovation, cmmi, you will hear that a lot today. cmmi is overseeing the payment approaches that we're going to be talking about today. eric de jonge. next to me is tricia neuman and eric de jonge, director of geriatrics and co-founder of the medical house call program at washington hospital center. eric will give us a glimpse of the independence at home program that is getting so much attention and that med star is planning to expand to other facilities. to my far left is jim garnham,

director of contract and payment innovation at the university of rochester medical center. he leads rochester's bundle payment program. and he also has a hand in its aco and risk-based models. we're going to start off with cristina bocutte who will talk about the recent work that kaiser has done and what evidence we have on hand. >> thank you. let's see. okay. good. so i'm going to start with just a little context for delivery system reform in medicare and then i'm going to go over very brief summary of three of the models and conclude with a few thoughts onion going challen on thoughts and context. also cms had already been running some new models on delivery system reform, the

affordable care act really brought in a large multi-pronged effort for delivery system reform. it created some permanent changes to the way hospitals are paid, for example, the hospital readmission reduction program. it created the office that called the medicare medicaid coordination office which is looking at ways to align payments for people who are duly eligible for medicare and medicaid. and the aca also established a cos through what's called the medicare shared savings program, which we will get into in a little bit. and the aca created the innovation center, which, of course, we call cmmi, because we love acronyms here in d.c. but cmmi was really marking a significant investment in testing new payment models. and the aca gave it unprecedented authority to

expand models that achieved certain specified performance on quality and spending. i would also mention that underlying delivery system reform in medicare was the passage of macra, the law that repealed the sgr, which was, of course, many former alliance briefing topics. but macra has within it financial incentives for physicians to be paid a bit more if they are participanttnts in alternative payment models. this will come in future years. cms is planning to release some regulations in the near future, some proposed rules on what exactly will be define -- will be used to define the alternative payment models. that should be coming out soon. and then a final piece of context is, of course, hhs's

overarching goals to shift more of traditional medicare payments towards value instead of volume-based reimbursement. perhaps dr. conway would be talking about that. so i'm not going to. but i will move on quickly to this slide which shows on left-hand side three models of delivery system reforms that we cover in the primer that is in your handouts. and i'm going to talk about some of the individual models that are there on the right-hand side. so starting with medical homes. to distill it down, medical homes are really based on the concept that investing a bit more main comprehensive primary care could lead to lower overall spending due to better health

outcomes when you invest earlier in primary care. all three of the models on this slide here involve care management fees to the medical homes. and the first two specifically have a focus on coordinating medicare care management fees with other insurers like private insurance and medicaid. and you can see on the map -- you can see on the map that they're clustered a bit for this reason. the lighter blue is the mapcp model. that has more involvement with states. you can see the whole state is colored in. and then the orange dots represent the cpc participants. and in those models, cmmi is playing a greater convening role with those insurers. the evaluation reports for the medical homes are starting to come in.

i think at this time net savings are not very high. but more results are coming. and the cpc model is showing some grains in quality. but, again, the others are awaiting more results. i will move on just for a moment to the independence at home model, which is also a primary care model. but, of course, we have an expert with direct experience. so i will just give you a couple teasers that show what's unique about this model. and one is that it focuses on home visits to address the care needs of frail patients. a second unique feature of this primary care model is that it does not involve care management fees. in fact, has within it the opportunity for the independence

at home practices to share in savings if they have lowered spending. and then we'll say that early results from independence at home are showing some promising savings. so then moving on to the acos, these are entities that have agreed to be held accountable for both spending and quality for the beneficiaries that have been assigned to them. they can contract with hospitals, physician groups, healthcare facilities. the model that accounts for the most beneficiaries by and large is the mmsp models. they account for 7 million beneficiaries across over 400 acos. the one that -- the mssp model with the most beneficiaries is the one that are called track one. in that model, the providers

don't take on financial risk with medicare. but they can share in savings. there are new tracks that are coming up, but perhaps dr. conway would mention them. so i won't. then there's also nine pioneer models which are required to take on financial risk. i would say that about -- well, about a quarter of the msmps i mentioned shared in savings as results came out for 2014. half of the pioneers achieved -- were able to share in savings. that model did get certified to be expanded. then the last little model i want to note is the bundled payment model. bundle payments, of course, we're lucky enough to have someone here who can talk about direct experience. so i would just characterize this model as one that focuses

on a whole episode of care rather than payments that are made to individual providers for the individual services that they themselves provide. the bpci demo has four different payment models. they're triggered by a hospitalization. but there are many details. so i'm not really going to get into them. but to say that the results are very preliminary. so finally, i will just close with a few comments oni ongoing challenges and opportunities. we see here that -- actually, i have to put my glasses on. cms launched a lot -- to be fair, a large number of payment models in a very short period of time and in a changing healthcare environment. we can note that while we're all sitting here wanting results, congress, providers, cms for

sure, it takes time. and so there's certainly attention between what we want and letting these models be fully implemented as they're being tested. i would say that the ability for cms to change these models while they're ongoing based on early results and based on unforeseen circumstances presents great opportunities and great challenges. for the evaluators certainly. finally, i would note that a key consideration that cms and congress will be considering as results come in for these models is how medicare beneficiaries are really faring in these models. particularly, those with high healthcare needs. they're the ones that we think some of these models were designed to help. so let's learn about them in particular. thank you. >> thank you, cristina. that's actually a great

transition. marilyn moon is now going to talk to us about how consumers are faring under these models. marilyn? >> thank you. i'm going to be relatively brief because i may be talking about a one horse pony here idea. and that is that consumers matter, and you really need to take them into accounts in these kinds of models. some of the earliest innovations that occurred and some of the earliest thoughts about innovations really were often done without thinking very much about consumers. imagine an aco that's getting organized, an accountable care organization that is thinking about steering patients into different other providers and a slightly different model and approaches, but the beneficiary often has no idea that they're in an aco. they may or may not have gotten a letter. they may or may not have known they have gotten a letter. and in many cases, they're not quite sure why the physician is

doing that. if it is for good purposes for both improved quality of care and lower prices, that's all for the better. but you are going to get a lot better cooperation, a lot better engagement and involvement if the beneficiary actually is engaged and knowledgeable about that. i remember when people were talking at an early event i went to about medical homes, which would you thi you would think would be particularly consumer sensitive. and after mentioning pisht s ii centered care, the term patient never arose, including when someone was asked about it. they said, the physicians have the patients' best interests at heart. they can take care of that problem. i think we need to change everyone's minds and attitudes in the health care world.

you are not going to change the heal health care system if you have people resistant to the change. none of us like to change things that we become familiar with and comfortable with, especially when it's something as complicated and uncomfortable and important as health care. so it's very important to get people on the same page. air where i work did a study a number of years s ago that i wasn't involved with but i thought was fascinating where they interviewed patients and then they interviewed doctors and gave them the same exact specific scenarios about health care trying to get people interested in quality. what they found was the reaction of the patients and the physicians were totally different. the patients' reactikreactions they were encouraged to look at quality measures to decide where to go to deliver a baby, reaction was, why would i want do that? i would ask my neighbor.

and in the case of the physician, the reaction was, why would i do that? why would i even want to take this patient, because he or she is going to be la tinlous itigiy are trying to steer me to a particular hospital. they were not only resistant to quality, but they were on a different page. so there's a lot of education and activity that needs to go on. no now, i will note that as mentioned in the primer, the new generations of models coming out are getting much better at that. they're trying to think of ways to encourage and involve patients. so i think that it's important to keep in mind that this may be a little bit of a dated comment but it's something to keep in mind because it's easy when people get focused on the tough technical things to do to leave the consumer out of it. one of the important pieces that needs to be part of all of this is to ask the question, what do patients really want to achieve?

and when designing goals for example for complex care, let's say post-acute care, it's very important to know what the patient wants to achieve. i can give you a personal example. when my husband was first out of the hospital and on home health after a stroke where he couldn't read numbers and he was very confused about a lot of things, he had a therapist who insisted that he needed to learn how to dial a telephone. and i kept telling her, no, he doesn't really need do that. all he needs to do is push this button because we have technological advance that allows him to just push this button. nonetheless, she was bound and determined that he was going to deal the telephone. after about five sessions, we told her she didn't need to come back. she never asked him what he wanted to achieve. there were plenty of things that he could have achieved that she could have helped with him in that period of time rather than the frustrations that he went through.

so whether it be to climb a set of stairs to sleep in your own bed after -- if you have health problems, whatever it is, the patient often has a goal. getting them involved very early on is really important. and finally, it's important that it's an opportunity to build in consumer issues from the very start to make sure that that gets baked into a new healthcare system rather than added on at the last minute. i think this is part of the reason why it takes time to achieve savings, because everybody is adjusting to a new environment. and before we either give up on new technology -- on new innovations or before we say that they aren't working, we have to make sure that everybody who is involved, physicians, other providers and patients, are all on board before we really judge whether or not it has been successful. thank you. >> patrick?

>> thanks for having me here today. really appreciate it. thanks for allowing me to be two minutes late. i apologize. i was coming from another speaking engagement. so it's actually a great segue. i think the reason we do this work is the people and the patients and families we serve. will hit on some highlights, but at its core, we think we can have a system that achieves better health, smarter spending and healthier people. to get there, i do think patients and families have to be at the center of care. we have policy principals we use at cms. one of them is around patients and families first. so these are the goals that were alluded to just briefly. the president and the secretary announced in early 2015 that we wanted to move at least 30% of payments by the end of 2016 in alternative payment models.

by the end of 2016. then in march, we actually announced we reached that a year ahead of schedule. i will -- that really is a dramatic shift in the delivery system. lots more to learn. on what works and why and what is scaleable and expandible. but a major shift in how we think about paying for care. goal number two included value based purchasing. includes things like hospital value based purchasing and other programs that tie payment to quality and/or cost. and the goal there was 85% of payments with link to quality and cost. we reached that ahead of schedule. this is not just a medicare issue. it's medicaid. it's state. it's commercial payers. so we launched a healthcare program and learning and action network to collaborate to not only achieve these goals but achieve better care on behalf of

patients. we have now got eight of the ten largest payers engaged. we have over 1,000 providers. we have consumer and patient organizati organizations. the focus of the work is how do we agree on goals which we have, agree on payment definitions which we have, agree on how to report on those, which we're starting to do now. and then maybe most importantly, work on alignment in many of the models. if we're talking about an aco, can we agree on basic construct around risk adjustment or quality measures or attribution models. this is a long-term journey. we set up the structure for effective public and private partnership. i was at the guiding committee. a number of the folks said, this work they thought was some of the most meaningful public-private partnership work they had done in a long time. so that's the goal to do this in partnership. the innovation center which

folks here -- we're not going to through all the models. we chose the same models to highlight. the aco model as was said, 480 acos serving almost 9 million beneficiaries now. we do have increasing numbers in risk bearing arrangements. 64 now and counting in risk baring arrangements. you are seeing this in public and private sector increasingly. pioneer aco that was alluded to. improved quality, 28 out of 33 qualify measures improved patient experience and lowered costs. so was certified by the actuary. we brought many of the pioneer components into medicare savings track three. it was designed so organizations could exit but nobody could enter by definition. your numbers go down over time. our model is now of a more flexible construct where people can come in or out at a more flexible way. next generation aco really

building from some of the learnings in pioneer. we're going to have a couple years of adding acos. first year was tight application cycle and had 21 come in. they also have opportunities to exit and others will have opportunities to enter. a few key points. one patients can voluntarily say, this is my aco. this sis my receive enhanced re. it rewards quality. all of our models focus on quality. waivers around skilled nursing facilities. we're trying to enable those provider organizations that are ready to partner with patients and their communities to move to a more advanced -- this can be fully population-based payment. so totally moving away from fee for service. we're excited about this model that started in january. applications are open now for new participants. primary care, i have an update

as of 9:00 a.m. this morning. so this was our first model on this slide. it did show decreased hospitalization, decreased e.r. visits. we will release the next set of results soon. we announced this morning what we're calling competent primary care plus, which is building on what we learned in the model. it has two tracks. i will talk about those. estimated 20 states and regions. multi-payer, similar to the previous primary care model when we agreed on quality measures. could be 20,000 physicians in the model. and 25 million patients. so it's the largest primary care model in u.s. history. we think very exciting. track one is similar to cpc but has a couple important changes like having the financial incentives at the practice level and more real time delivery of incentives and payments to

practices on a monthly basis. track two, they can move to population based payment. so greater than 50% of pavements coming from population-based payments. a compensatory reduction in fee for service. really opens up the practices that can deliver care the way they want to. patients can receive the care when and where they want to, whether at home or remote or care management. sorry to talk about that a little longer. exciting just in time delivery from this morning. independence at home, i will let others talk about. incredibly exciting. will let others that know the model better than i speak to that. bundled payment which you will hear about, we have now got over 1500 what we call episode initiators. these are physician groups or hospitals or post-acute care facilities taking on two-sided risk in 48 -- in one or more of 48 various episodes. these are things everything from surgical condition like hip and knee replacement to medical diseases that are complex. we're resigning the care system,

building the connections between hospitals and physicians and post-acute care providers and early results are promising in terms of improved quality and lower costs. we're actually working on releasing more results here as well. that led to our care for joint replacement model which in 67 markets we're testing, this is how we're going to pay for joint replacement. we want you to improve quality, lower costs and have better care coordination. it includes testing patient reported outcome measures. so directly hearing from patient about their functional status and outcomes which we think is exciting and important. we heard from patients in these type of procedures. so we think an exciting development. i will end on time. i have 20 seconds. i will say a few more sentences. this is -- i'm a practicing physician. this is exciting work. i think we're in exciting times. i this i we have made significant progress over the last three to five years improving our health system. collectively, i think we have to

view this as a long-term journey. i always want short-term results as well. we need to continue to evaluate, to learn and rapid cycle to scale what works and i think look forward to the rest of the panel and discussion. but exciting times. >> fantastic. thank you, patrick. so this is the part of our program where we turn to the on the ground perspective. we're lucky to have with us today two gentlemen who are right in the middle of these experiments. so we're going to hear from them. before we do that though, i want to remind anybody who is following us on twitter that our hash tag is medicare demos. you can comment. you can ask questions. which brings us to the point that after eric and jim speak, we're going to turn to a q & a session. for those of you in the room, you have two options. there are two microphones in the

room. you are welcome to ask your question at the microphone. you also have green cards in your folder that you can write a question on and our staff will be around to pick it up. so we have two more presentations before we get to the q & a. so get your questions ready. if you want to start writing questions, feel free to go ahead and do so. if you are watching at home, on c-span, you can tweet us your questions. we do take twitter questions. we will try to answer as many as we can. again, the hash tag is medicare demos. i will turn it over to eric de jonge who will talk about house calls, independence at home program. >> thank you. thank you. can you hear me? thank you very much. i'm going to start off with a disclosure, which i -- is on my

front slide. i want everyone to know i will talk about home based primary care, a house call clinical model for elders and how that led to the independent pece at . my disclosure is, my presentation does not involve cms sponsored analyses. it's my responsibility and no review or verification by them. hopefully, patrick will be okay with it. next slide. i'm going to talk first about the patients that we serve. i would like to do a brief survey of the room. how many people in this room have an elder in their life who is sick and has trouble getting to the doctor's office? raise your hand. looks like more than half the room. independence at home and home-based primary care is the model of care for those people. 17 years ago, dr. george toller and i came to d.c. and decided

to set up a clinical model for care for those who are frail and have trouble getting to the office. a house call program but more than that. a home-based primary care program that would follow them across all settings. we'll talk more about the details. we wanted to look at the effect of that kind of model, a mobile team-based approach to care in the home on quality of care, the patient's experience and ultimately the costs of care. which is i would say a secondary outcome. most importantly, what is the impact on the patient and the family? we will talk about some of those results. then i want to close with talking about what's next. how can allies and policy makers both here in this room and across the city help us expand this program? so who are the patients? it's actually a highly targeted clinical service. in contrast to some of the other demos, it targets less than 5% of the medicare population.

roughly 2 million of the medicare population could be eligible if it was expanded nationwide. our practice, they age 66 to 110. the 110-year-old just recently passed away. she was born on january 1, 1900. at the beginning of the century. so this is the kind of folks that we talk care of. this service, the intervention is really simple to describe. hard to execute. it's interdisciplinary mobile primary care teams. 24/7 availability across all clinical settings. it's not just about making house calls. you take care of the patients wherever they are. you coordinate all services that they need, medical services, social services, sub-specialty, transportation, whatever they need. the goal ultimately is to enhance the health and dignity, bring peace of mind to the caregivers and families. those are the two primary goals. happy side effect of this kind of care is that it has a dramatic impact on per capita medicare costs which we will

talk about. in a positive way. the independence at home model, which was based on home-base primary care systems across the country, allows home based primary care teams to be scaleable. that's the major take home point for the day. the independence at home both demo and payment model allows it to be scaleable. the reason for that is -- we will talk about more. these are the main points. there's strict criteria for eligible patients. you have to be frail, disabled, have had high costs in the past year. there's a high bar for service quality in the program. you need to have all the researchers in play to take good care of these very complex patients. you only receive savings only after you have achieved 5% reduction in per capita medicare costs. there's no up-front payment to the programs. there's no payment until you have exceeded statistically a greater than 5% reduction.

you have to link the savings to six relevant quality metrics that providers would get 80% of savings if they immediate all six quality metrics. this highlights -- it highlights the focus on the top 5%. why that has super a big impact. the orange on the top on left is is the number of beneficiaries. but they expend nearly 50% of the budget. this is similar now in the current medicare medicaid population as well as commercial payers. this is the population you focus on to have the greatest impact on costs. i'm going to talk about a patient. a 69-year-old who had liver and falls and care given burden. the year before she moved to d.c., she had six admissions to the hospital. that's six admissions per patient year. the daughter moved her mom to d.c. in order to gaen in entry a

program. for last four years, she's received over 150 house calls, many social services, coordination of aid, home x-rays, ekgs, wound care, many urgent visits by our team. had a terminal diagnosis reversed. had a radiology procedure where she was hemorrhage and we thought she was going to die. we used the hospital high level high tech care to do kind of a last minute procedure that worked. she has been home for the last 18 months. in the last 4 1/2 years now, she's had two admissions. she's been four years orlando a older and four seeks sicker. she had one e.r. visit in four years. i have to change this. two days ago she had another e.r. visit. i want to say it's two in two years. how does this work? this is say busy slide. i won't read it all other than

to say, home based primary care team has to coordinate everything. over time, until the last day of life. we coordinate routine and urgent visits. today from the weekend, we had ten unstable patients. nurse practitioners around d.c. making house calls to prevent emergency room visits and keep people at home. we coordinate e.r. care, sub-speshthty. we direct hospital care so we can manage the discharge to home. we're available 24/7, as are all of the programs have to have a 24/7 availability. we manage rehab, hospice. the next six are the things you can do at home. what is possible? the hospital really is only for intensive care, surgery, procedures, complex level of things. you can do almost everything else at home. from radiology to blood draws to ekgs to echos to equipment to i.v. as long as you coordinate, you

can have a dramatic reduction in costs. this is a quote from sylvia, the daughter of the patient, about how the program saved her mom's life. it restored her faith in the system. the good days, hours and moments she has are a result of the passion and commitment of those who created the program. she gave us permission to give this quote. i will close with some of the results. this is the v.a. study that came out in 2014. the highest rated program in the v.a., 12% lower costs. a study of our program showed similar mortality, high mortality of both controls and cases, but a 17% reduction. the independence at home year one results, ours had a 20% per capita cost reduction. that was $1,000 per patient month. close to $12,000 per patient year. nine of the 17 programs were paid savings ranging from six to 31% savings. in year one, 25 million was saved in 12 million was returned to the providers.

i will close with just what are the challenges going forward. finding the skilled work force is probably the number one goal. it's very doable. the people are out there. you have to have a financial model that will support them. you have to build a lot of practice capacity to support these teams. all the other service partners. then you have to have a health system that will commit to really doing value-based care. unfortunately, med star is building a new team in baltimore based on the independence at home results. both the quality and the cost savings, because they have faith that cms and other payers will row ward this kind of care. finally, how can you all in this room help? i would -- we are working with senate finance house ways and means and energy and commerce to turn it into a national program, a permanent part of medicare available in all 50 states and d.c. and i'm glad to talk with you about how that is going or afterwards. make sure you link savings to

relevant quality metrics. for this population, for people in the lost couple years of life. their sugar level doesn't matter that much when they just have a year or two left of life. it has to be within parameters. make sure it's relevant for population. cms have been working hard on independence at home to target the right patients who have persistent high costs, use fair and very rigorous criteria for new practices as we roll this out across the country that will preserve the quality and the impact. use really good fully risk adjusted methods when you do the outcomes anal s s s of the anals fair to the government and provud pr provid provider. here is a picture of our team. this say team is a team of 20 pe in d.c. that do the work. finding the right people is the key to success. thank you. [ applause ] >> i just have to say that i had the privilege of sitting in on a

team meeting and shadowing george toller who is your partner in crime. this is the work you kind of hear about. this is team-based approach. it's collaborative. it's using people to do what they do best in different capacities. and if i had someone who was old and sick and impaired in d.c., i would be thrilled to give you a call. >> thank you. >> great. we're going to move now to jim garnham who will give us his own perspective from the university of rochester medical center where they are trying out bundled payments. jim. >> great. thank you. i appreciate the time to be here this morning or this afternoon. i do want to just level set understandings of what bundle payments are. it's a single budget for an episode of care. we have a little bit of a definition around that. it starts with in our case an

in-patient admission. what we call the anchor admission. it goes out beyond discharge out to again in our case 90 days. there are options for less time than that. it includes if you think about everything that happens to the patient after they are discharged from the hospital, in-patient, out-patient, physician, nursing home. there was a term used earlier today about patient sen tristy and what marilyn said is the patient comes first. if you think about a patient-centered approach to care, i think first and foremos. if you think about somebody has knee replacement surgery, how have i conceived it, if i need knee replacement, think bundle starts at the episode or the episode starts when i go to my doctor and say, you know what, the injections aren't working, the medication isn't working and it ends when i go back to golfing and now i have a better excuse for how bad i golf.

that's the totality for me, the concept of what knee replacement is. that's how patients think about. it's not how we finance it. it's now hot we pay for it. i'm excited to be part of this program because i think it very much is a much more patient centered viewpoint. as you can understand, if we're at risk for that care, then there's a huge incentive for us to reduce unnecessary care and reduce unwarranted variation. that's what we started with. we started with do we have volumes here that would indicate that we -- it's worth doing and do we have variations that would say that there is something that we can do to reduce that variation standardized care and improve care and reduce cost. but while this is a financial arrange mntd ant contracting arrangement and that's why i'm involved, ultimately, first and foremost, this is a clinical practice. it's a clinical program. so we had to go to them. we took the data which is great and we went to the leads of our service lines and said, here is

some opportunities. here some potential opportunities for us to improve care, reduce cost and really dip our toe into value-based payment. what would you do differently? what would you do to go after this opportunity? what resources would you need? how much would it cost? how quickly could you get there? what kind of outcomes do you think you could achieve? >> do we have the clinical knowledge to get this done? ultimately, do we have the clinical leadership that can actually get it there? this brought us then down to the major joint replacement as one opportunity. then congestive heart failure as the other. these are very different programs. so this is just a little bit of the data that we started with. this is our baseline data, some of it. each vertical line is an episode. the colors indicate where the dollars are being spent. it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out, green is probably where we need to focus. for major joint replacement,

it's skilled nursing facility-based rehab. we started out at 74% of our patients were going home with skilled nursing -- to a skilled nurse facility. we can probably do better than that. we can get it down to 25% within a year. congestive heart failure, different story. there is some skilled nursing facility. but i look at that and i go, what is red? how can we eliminate it? red is readmission. the whole thing about congestive heart failure is keeping people from coming back. if any of you have anybody in your life that has congestive heart failure, you know the revolving door. so we have nailed down what the objectives are. now we have to have a plan to get there. so we start obviously with the inpatient side. the hospital is the one at risk. we have the right folks in the room. this is not just about improving care in the hospital and handing it over to the post-acute side. we brought the post-acute folks into the facility and said, work with us. help us understand these patients.

help us figure out not only what we do here but also what you do on the post-acute side. let's coordinate and let's have a unified plan of care across this continuum. then we need -- once we figure out that, we need a way to keep track of those folks. we have a couple of resources. one is a dashboard, which is just a way to -- a place to put people. it's a software package. we can keep track of people. the real key is the care naf gator. one person who has specific focus and responsibility to watch these folks across the continuum of care. not just in, okay, here we are done at the hospital, here you go. it's continuing that process all the way through the end so they are there -- a single point of contact for patients and for providers. then the other major resource we applied was enhanced home care. for joint replacement, clearly it was getting rehab done in the home with home care and not in a sniff. for congestive heart failure,

different approach. it's all about applying those home care resources in a rapid environment so that instead of picking up the phone and calling for an ambulance and going to the ed and back up to the hospital, it's you call the care -- the nurse navigator or the nurse visiting nurse service and say, come out and do an ceasement. they can bring telemedicine resources so we can do a consult with cardiology on site and even administer iv medications if that's what's necessary to keep folks from coming back into the hospital. so results. we all care about results, right? this is major joint replacement. green line is rehab. you see there were 74% at baseline. we set a target for 25%. we have already blown through that. but that's not enough. we want to make sure we're not doing that and then people are coming back into the e.d. or back into the hospital because instead of being in a snf where they are getting good care, they are home and not getting the care they need. our e.d. visit rate actually went down. not only did it not go up, it went down. we are very encouraged by that.

and we did then the cost curve. we did achieve what we were looking for. we think we can do better. congestive heart failure, completely different population. we have not yet really solved the readmission problem but there's one shining star in this. remember, we said we had this clinical pathway and part of that was home care, enhanced home care services to this population. so if we look at just the population that went home, didn't go to a snf, the people that went home with no home care which means they were offered and refused it, they came back at least 40% of the time, 47% of the time, they came back at least once. if they went home with a home care agency that was not one of our partners, they came back 43% of the time. if they went home with our partner home care agency that was committed to applying those rapid resources and doing telemedicine and iv lasix administration, the medication we use to control fluid

retention, 17% of the time they came back. so there's a glimmer of hope here and i think if we just keep focusing on that model i think we will do better. so i just want to, in the 30 seconds i have left, i want to just say there's one piece of this that i'm really excited about, and sort of the spillover effects and the lessons learned, and that is you would expect the clinical leaders would all be about hey, let's apply these resources, great resources to more than just the medicare bundled payment folks. so we have had that. we expect that. what i didn't expect is i have just as much attention from the administration of the hospital saying how can we leverage this to other patients, we have a unique opportunity here to really improve the quality of care that we're delivering, reduce the costs that we're delivering. how can we figure out a way to afford this to broaden it out to other populations. that's a really exciting place for a policy wonk like me to be, because usually you're trying to

drag along the culture and instead, i'm seeing the culture change before our eyes. so i will end with that. and we will take questions. >> great. thank you for that very, very specific information about these on the ground programs. it's incredibly helpful. we are now open for questions. i invite folks in the room to come up to the microphone. i invite anybody who would prefer to write a question on the green card and our staff will be around to pick up your questions and bring them to us. if you are at home watching this live on c-span, please tweet a question. anybody in the room can also tweet a question. again, the hash tag is medicare demos. while we are getting folks set, i will turn it over to trisha to kick us off. >> i think i have -- this is a question for patrick. we did some work a few years ago that looked at people who live in nursing homes, so people on

medicare who have very high rates of emergency room use, they go in and out of the hospital, they are high medicare spenders even though we don't think of medicare as the place for medicare spending for nursing home residents. i think there may be two demonstrations, a new one and an older one. could you tell us a little bit about how they are moving and what materithe early evidence m be? >> there are two. they are both managed by innovation center and the office that was alluded to focused on beneficiaries in medicare and medicaid. the first was around evidence-based practices and implementing those to decrease admissions and readmissions. we did see early evidence of a decrease of admissions and readmissions and higher quality, but early in that program. then we overlaid a financial incentive on top of that model to really reward financially as well if we were able to prevent admissions and readmissions. this is a population that we

care about deeply and two models that have not been certified for expansion yet. but the early results are promising. >> great. let's move to the microphones. >> i'm dr. caroline poplin. i have a specific question for dr. de jonge and a more general question. the specific question for dr. de jonge is home health visits. my understanding is that congress has been cutting the amount of money for home health because they think there's a lot of fraud in the program. the fraud that i have seen, because i'm also an attorney, is for-profit home health care provided to people who don't need it while avoiding the people who do need it because it's expensive. my question for the panel is along the lines of marilyn moon,

is value for whom? i know value is supposed to be quality over cost, but are the patients involved in the quality measures, and i don't mean patient satisfaction surveys, because for a healthy patient, that's parking, and ability to schedule, and to call the doctor at night. and for a sick person, it's time with the doctor, to ask all the questions and get the explanations and get some empathy. >> yes. there are two questions there. one is just about home health care. the medical house call home based primary care model taps into skilled home health care as needed. we have found many very good ethical high integrity home health care agencies we work with. we use them when we need them for episodes of care, but they are part of the team in the ih

model. then in terms of -- could you restate your second question? >> the second question has to do with value. when we talk about substituting value for volume, i guess you're talking about quality over cost, but value to whom? >> from my perspective, independents at home looks at this as well, value to the patient and family in terms of their goals, their outcomes. one of the six metrics that's directly linked to savings is whether the patient and family's goals and preferences for ends of life care are documented, whether they receive a house call within 48 hours of going home. so it's value for the patient and family first, and then value for the payor in terms of being able to afford the care. i think it has to be both. >> i would like to hear dr. conway address it or some of these other people who are involved in the program setting them up, setting the quality measures, whether patients are involved in the quality measures. frankly, i don't care how many

mammograms my doctor has ordered. >> i think you're making a good point. i think one of the things that makes most sense to me when you look at these models is to think about whether or not there's actually both flexibility and coordination that goes on, because then you are talking to the patient and you are getting involved in what the patient wants, and it seems to me that in terms of achieving those goals, the kinds of things that we were hearing about both in terms of the bundled payment and the independence at home have a better opportunity to do that than ones that are really focused on, are more technically focused and don't involve the patients as much. >> we do have patients on the various quality measure development teams and committees that review quality measures for implementation in various programs. it is critical. >> so let's move to the other side, if you could please identify yourself. >> i'm joanne lamb from the institute center for elder care and advanced illness.

i'm delighted that we are on this journey. i feel like we are sort of lewis and clark in their first winter, knowing where they're headed, sort of, but having no idea how far away it is and what they will encounter. but i think that really continuing to work on what it is we're trying to get to is an important part of the endeavor, because some of what we are now doing may make it harder to get to where we hope to go, and in that light, let me invite folks to weigh in some on where it is we're going. we talk about total costs of care as if that's an obvious idea. we are only talking about total costs of care in medicare. the big issue is long-term services and supports and especially family care givers. when we cut out all the snf days and we're tshly proud of it and sharing yoour profits with the

providers, we forget that means families have to take people home much sicker still with their wound clips in, still unable to do a two-person transfer and someone has to cope with that. someone loses work. the care giver, the average woman family care giver loses a quarter million dollars toward her own retirement by taking care of her mother. that's big. but we don't account for that. the big issue is not -- it's a big enough issue just what we're going to do within medicare, but medicare has this huge kind of semi-permeable barrier with long term services and supports and it's even bigger especially if you start counting family caregiving. if we start counting quality measures in that arena we get into things like people not wanting to be bankrupt, not wanting to lose the ranch, not wanting to be a burden on their kids or grandkids. it seems that the vision like lewis and clark trying to imagine the pacific has to include some real end point that

isn't just paying providers for doing what they ought to have been doing 20 years ago. eric and george started their effort 20 years ago. we knew then what we needed to do. it seems that we really have to start kind of planning these modifications in light of where we hope to get to and that it seems might require thinking in terms of small localities, at least for these very sick people. it doesn't matter -- >> are you going to a question? >> i want them to weigh in on whether this steeeems to be whe we're going. one of the directions for movement would be to really take account of the seriously disabled, seriously frail elders in a geographic community and build the capacity more broadly there. much of what we are now doing makes that harder to do, because we are building, financing and quality measure lines that do not support that endeavor. >> let's see if we can get a

reaction from the panel here. anybody? >> i can take a little bit of that. you bring up a really good point and i think it deserves a lot more than i have the time to address today. let me just give you just a small sliver of what we're doing. so we don't simply turn people over to their home and say here you go, good luck to you. it actually starts well before the surgery, when we are talking about joint replacement. we actually go out to the home, meet with that person, meet with their care giver and plan their discharge with them and their care giver jointly so it is not just our decision to say you're going to go home, it's a joint decision with the patient and their care giver and the provider. so you are absolutely right, we can't just kick people home and expect that the family's going to pick up the slack. >> great. let's move to the other mike. did you have a comment, patrick? >> you obviously talk a lot so i won't give a long answer. i think we are trying through

accountable health communities through some of our medicare transformation work including on long-term services and supports and some of our state innovation work to start to address more of these issues and the holistic care paradigm including out of the provider system and really testing models at the community level to improve health, and health outcomes. i think it's a fair point that we have more learning to do in this arena about how to do that the best way possible. >> great. so thank you. let's move to this microphone. >> thank you. my name is amy gibson. i'm with the patient center primary care collaborative. i want to build on some of the comments marilyn, you were making about how we get buy-in and why buy-in among patients is critically important. one of the things we have come to realize is you really need to have them involved as partners in the design of the program from the very beginning. we just heard from a panel of patients in a conference in chicago, from a patient who reminded us that quality is

assumed by patients. so when they are going to get advice on where to go to get their best care, they are not necessarily looking for a four or five star rating that shows them that the quality is good, but rather, as you address, that they are going to their friends to find out did your doctor really listen to you, what was your experience in care. i think if we have the conversation with patients around improving experience of care, and they also absolutely understand value of care. dr. conway, i certainly want to first and foremost applaud cms for all that you have done to demonstrate how important those collaborations are from the very beginning. our organization is funded as an alignment network specifically to facilitate these collaborations and meaningful partners with patients and families in clinical redesign. dr. conway, i just want to kind of have you talk about that and some of your learnings and how cms is starting to evolve those relationships and even through the expansion of programs that are successful and new programs that you're developing, what are

you doing to better assure that there is that collaboration meaningful partnership with patients from the very beginning? >> yes. thank you for the question. it's a critically important issue. a few things we're trying to do. one which was talked about earlier, the sort of quality measures and what's the quality focus. we think patients and care gi givers are the most important voice in that equation. we are doing this now and i appreciate the positive comments. i think we need to continue to do it better. how do you engage patients and families really in the design as you said. and the life cycle of the model. and i think this is something we have met with a number of groups, thinking through this, and how to do it more systematically so stay tuned for even more. i think we agree with the concept that you want patients, people, consumers, families and care givers to use all terms to be as inclusive as possible to help design these models, to be

co-creators both at the start through the evolution of the model as we try to improve models and in aspects of evaluation such as the quality measures involved. >> thank you. >> so let's move to a question from one of our green cards. we actually have a few questions on the issue of how well does all of this work in rural areas. several of the demonstrations we have heard about are sort of well suited for areas where there's a concentration of people and providers, i think there's a story in the paper this morning about some of the challenges that people in rural areas face, especially seniors. i think a quarter of all people in medicare are living in rural areas. this is really for anybody in the panel. we have talked about scaling up things that work. do they work in rural areas? >> this is eric de jonge. i think independence at home can work in any area of the country, rural, suburban and urban.

the challenge is how do you staff it. in arizona and new mexico, there's an ih life kind of home based primary care program that uses more televideo. these are slightly different staffings. the doctors are sometimes more consultants but you can achieve the same goals of keeping people at home, using mobile technology with a slightly different kind of staffing mix. but i think this can be done in any geography. >> just building on that briefly, this is an issue we focus on significantly. i think the primary care models can be done in rural areas. we did advanced payment, other methods in our program which had the vast majority in the last round of participants were small practices or rural practices to help with the transformation work. we also are engaging with a number of states that are thinking about population based payments for rural areas and what that might look like. more work to be done but a

number of these molds cdels witk successfully in rural areas and how can that be done. >> my name is jenny boyer with health net federal services. we are the contractor that manages tricare in the northeast. >> might pull the mike a little bit closer. >> sure. my question, especially to those of you who are involved in making policy, all the pilots are great when it's well known and high quality facility for a small area, but how do you scale that for the whole country and what happens when the quality inevitably deteriorates? >> that might be for me again. so a few thoughts. one, the majority of our pilots are voluntary, either community,

state or provider pilots. you are seeing a number now like the joint replacement which are testing in a geographic area including all providers in a geographic area. the sequence there as we saw early positive results in the joint replacement model from the bbci, the bundles model that was talked about. now we are testing a geographic area to learn what you just described. will the results be the same in a diversity of providers. we do have monitoring, we are trying to minimize unintended negative consequences and trying to eliminate them if possible. we have monitoring, we have the ability to pull people out of models. we have other tools we use when we have major issues. but i think you need an array of testing strategies. you picked up a lot of the early doctors and now we are moving to the big middle and shifting the curve as was alluded to. it's how do we now learn in this sort of big middle of transformation and what works with the big middle, if you will. how does context, sorry to

answer long, i try to be brief. it's a good question, though. context of the providers really matter, et cetera. so we are trying to structure this now in a sort of step-wise progression that picks up an increasing number of states, communities and providers across the country, including ones that maybe historically weren't high performers but want to be high performers in a population of construct and lastly, sorry, supporting people. we are making major investments through transforming clinical practice which was alluded to and other initiatives to support various providers states and communities to improve. >> marilyn, could i just add that i think that not only do you see in the beginning that high performers but you often see the highly motivated and ready to change folks. and it's the not so ready to change people that you worry about then bringing these two. so i'm glad to see dr. conway talking about the importance of them providing additional resources and providing education and information to

people, because they -- the leaders already are motivated to change in many cases and it's the folks who are just not sure that's what they want to do or are skeptical that you need to bring along. i think that is a really important aspect of the next stage of all of this. >> thank you very much. >> great. we have another question at the mike. >> hi. i'm carl poser he, co-chair of the long term care discussion group. i really enjoyed the presentation about the independence at home program and the savings to medicare and the quality of the care. but i thought of this question before the other two questions. but it's sort of a follow-up. what do we really know about the incidence of long term care medicaid costs and the burden of unpaid care giving around and if you don't have specific studies, what's your sense? does it also save in assisted

living, nursing home and home care, long term care services or doesn't it? and what about the needs, you know, the pull on the unpaid care giver? >> sure. thank you. so in our practice here in d.c., we have a less than 5% incidence of nursing home placement per year, so about 95% plus of our patients stay at home long term. that's much lower than kind of the benchmark around the country for this population. we haven't done the medicaid cost analysis. there's actually a number of both at penn and i know within cms some interest in doing that. our experience is if you have social workers on the team as we do and you have the true inter-disciplinary approach and get the care for the care givers and the patient in place, the kind of amount of nursing home placement and then therefore medicaid costs significantly less. >> i'm afraid this one might be

for dr. conway, too. maybe anybody else want to join in, that would be terrific. everyone including presidential candidates is talking lately about the problem of rising drug costs. how will these demos address the problem and are there any particular demos that directly address this issue? i think i know from where you were speaking this morning that you have a specific demonstration to talk about. >> yes. so a number of the models before i talk about the specific one do include drug costs, typically b costs, but next generation even includes the possibility of organizations bringing in d costs. our own care model which we had robust interest in, we look forward to announcing the participants, also includes both a and b costs so includes drugs. we do have a part b model which i spoke this morning about that directly focuses on paying for value and better patient yut

comes in part b. i want to say clearly it does not limit access. we do not believe the proposal limits access for any patient to get any drug they need and any physician to describe any drug they think is warranted. if there are examples that people can provide around limiting access we would want to know about those because access and focusing on better patient outcomes is a core principle for us. it's a proposal we are seeking comment on that we could be directly aligned with paying for value in the drug arena. >> have you another question at the mike? >> this is christine grossman with the alliance for specialty medicine. i actually had a question actually for jim. i used to work at cms actually up until quite recently. i had a question on your bundled payments portion. so you talk about the episode of care lasting until 90 days post

services. i heard you have several docs both now and in my previous position in the past at cms having issues in terms of following up with patients and you know, getting information past 90 days. i wanted to see if you all account for that and you know, what you do in terms of if a patient doesn't follow up and how that computes into bundled care. >> patient followup is a huge issue for us, particularly for the congestive heart failure. i will tell you a little bit of a story. this is only tongue in cheek. one of the medical directors of the congestive heart failure program said that if he could find a way to combine the oral lasix medication which is the drug we use for fluid retention with crack, then we could get our patients to be compliant.

he was only half-kidding. so when you talk about patient followup, we have care navigators that are constantly calling and visiting folks to try and get them to come into those follow-ups which is one of the reasons why we have initiated telehealth services through the visiting nurse service so if they can't get back to the clinic for their followup appointment, we will go to them so they can have that visit wherever they happen to be. but patient followup is one of the hardest things to do in this population. >> thanks. >> okay. thank you. so to follow on that, let's talk about additional implications for patient involvement. so there are some pros and cons associated with passive enrollment in these models of care. what are the implications of more or less patient beneficiary involvement?

>> i can comment a little bit more as an analyst looking a bit like you said at the pros and cons. i'd say -- and while some models are being introduced in the future that allow more patient engagement, some of the ones we have results about now have more the passive attributes. i think some of the thoughts behind that are that in the one hand, it's not very disruptive to the patients. this is going behind the scenes through claims-based analysis, and then it in fact places greater -- a greater role for the providers to really engage the patients and work on the care. and also it eliminates some of the selection issues that i think marilyn sort of brought up, where although this is more the patient selection, where

patients, whether they be recruited or not recruited, so some of the passive enrollment from an analyst's perspective has some merit. but on the other hand, you're losing by this passive attribution, you're losing patients volunteering to be part of this model and then being more proactive in listening to the care decisions and making choices about which providers might in fact be higher quality, lower cost. so i think there is a push and pull, and i imagine that the future models that are coming are going to be assessing both that push and pull about selection issues versus patient engagement and patient involvement. >> and for some, it could be both. that there's both passive populations plus active choice

populations on top and so we do want to learn how to do this best and what's the sort of deepest level of patient engagement necessary and i think just to build on the answer which i agree with, on some models it may be both. >> so i want to note, we have 15 minutes or so to go through -- to get through more questions, but i want to point out that in your packets you have a blue evaluation sheet and we would be very grateful if you would take a moment to fill it out. we have actually made it a little bit shorter so it's easier to fill out, so we would be grateful if you did that. this is not an invitation to leave. so i would actually like to ask patrick and the others up on the dais to look into the crystal ball into the future, into the next year, into the next two years, to give us an idea of what's coming next, whether it be expansion of some of the

programs we are already seeing in demonstration projects, whether we are expecting to see some new kinds of programs that are bubbling up that aren't necessarily part of the demos but they are starting to come about in the private sector, what will be the focus? what do you all see coming down the road if we look ahead? >> i can start on this. so great question. first, at a high level, i actually see the level of transformation accelerating and my prediction is that may continue in a positive direction. i think i'm seeing a cultural shift. three or four years ago i talked to a big group of ceos about this and i could tell yeah, yeah, that may happen some day but not that worried about it. including a very tangible example where the person said i will never be in one of your models and now are in a bunch of our models. it's because you have seen a cultural shift that people know

this is where we're going, it's the path we're on, we need to learn how to get there. i think the progress will continue. regardless, delivery system reform i think is truly bipartisan. then on the details, three things. you will see increasing -- we announced the certification of the diabetes prevention program which we haven't talked about today. a few weeks ago, i think you will see increasingly results that meet the bar for expansion and therefore expanding the program. you will also see us take learnings from programs even if it's not formal expansion and propose them into various programs. two, i think you will see continued models that fill gaps like the conference and primary care plus model today. we are working on direct consumer oriented models that are complicated and hard to get right but we worked on health plan innovation which we haven't talked about much today. the drug space, you have part b model that's a proposal. you will see gap filling. then three, i think this private sector public partnership aspect you will see accelerate. increasingly when i interact with private payers in states

and medicaid programs there's agreement on this is where we need to go. there is actually agreement on a lot of the high level payment models. i think you will see a shift across the public and private sector which i have been on the provider side and had to deal with, makes it much easier to succeed if you are getting a common signal across your payers from your state, et cetera, about moving to this alternative payment world. >> i would like to talk about how this will affect things. i think the argument for increasing impetus for change comes from the demographics of the baby boom population turning 65. much more accustomed to questioning authority, much more accustomed to being skeptical about being told something by a physician, for example, and with all of the attention and publicity around change, i think

recognizing that change is not only going to be coming but that if people want to have a role in it they need to be fairly active. on the passive side or on the more troubling side, we will have an increasing population of diverse people on medicare program than we do now, as increasingly the number of latinos and african-americans increases as a share of the population on medicare. that increased diversity means that you have a bit more of a challenge in reaching out to those people who have different cultural backgrounds, particularly on the hispanic side, where we know from a lot of research that people behave differently, respond differently, interact with the health care providers differently, and that's going to mean that unless we reach out and really try to provide good outreach and education, that there will be some problems

there. it can be on the one hand, on the other hand, i guess. but i think there will be some positive things and there will be some additional remedial work that needs to be done. >> i have one more change that i fool li feel like i see has come up here and come up on the panel which is about health work force. i see that changing a bit where we have the navigator with the bundling that is mentioned rochester and we have community health workers involved in hospitals in the paper today. i think, and in the rural areas which came up as a question, there's different work force models that i think may have the ability to coordinate care across settings, even better. i think that might go hand in hand if the payment incentives continue to find ways to marry those, so the work force, but that needs to be cultured.

there's other systems to develop that. >> i have a question. >> i have a question. which is we are talking about changes in traditional medicare and really learning from different models in order to improve the way care is provided. i'm wondering how all of this relates to what's going on in the medicare advantage world and whether or not some of the lessons learned from medicare advantage are being applied into traditional medicare and conversely, are the things that are working in traditional medicare being injected into the medicare advantage space, and how would a beneficiary know? >> yes. so i will start. others can jump in. so we are having this bidirectional learning and approach and i will describe briefly further. so one, there's examples of models, for example, value based insurance design which we

launched in medicare advantage. we had seen much of that work from the private market. it's bringing those learnings and testing them in the medicare advantage market. i interact routinely as do many of us with the medicare advantage, their various clinical quality and innovation leaders. so we are learning from them on some of the consumer oriented work they are doing as well. i think likewise, we have examples in acos, bundles, independence at home, primary care, where we are sharing directly what we are doing with other payers, encouraging them because often we can encourage but not require, which is appropriate. and encouraging the various medicare advantage plans to adopt or consider adopting these various new payment models. we are seeing that happen. i think you will see the way that medicare advantage plans pay providers in traditional medicare providers increasingly converge over time. >> just as a quick followup, for something like independence at home which is focused on the

frailest high cost people who are living in the community, is that something that is a part of the care system that medicare advantage plans are providing as far as you know, and is cms working with medicare advantage plans to be sure that these best practices if they are best practices are being replicated for beneficiaries no matter which delivery system they choose? >> can i just mention that medicare advantage companies are taking up independence at home model home based primary care. there's multiple states, both new york and oregon, already programs are having contracts with medicare advantage companies to be paid under per member per month that covers the costs of the program and gets them into the black and they are now doing that care as we speak. >> great. >> primary care plus which we announced today, we want medicare advantage plans, medicare plans, commercial plans at the table. >> great. question with the mike?

>> i'm marian grant with the coalition to transform advanced care. these models are great. and hopefully they will continue to be successful. but how will we coordinate these models into the future? so if you are a frail elder who needs a hip replacement, are you in an aco but you are also part of independence at home and then it's a bundled payment? can you speak, i know the demos are individual projects which they need to be from an evaluation standpoint but how is it going to come together? >> i will just say from the doc perspective on the ground, i think that the patient population has to drive the financial models, the payment models, not vice versa. you have a lot of silos of all these different financial models but ultimately in our program we take care of the patient from day one until the day, their last day of life, and all of that care for now is within independence at home.

we right now are not in an aco because they are right now mutually exclusive. we don't participate in bundles either because that would kind of interfere with the shared savings model. for right now, ih is a stand-alone all the way fully coordinated program. and that's the way i think for now it needs to work. >> we have other examples like you can be a bundled payment into d-plus in aco and we have mechanisms on the back end if you will to show we're not double paying but also align the incentives across programs. we will continue to work on those issues. >> i would just say i think that what we are going find is as some of these things fall out and we really find financial mechanisms that are working, they will become the industry standard for how care is paid for and organized and so we are going to have to work through those issues. we did this 20, 30 years ago with drgs. the hospitals stopped billing for every little bit and we bundled the care together in that. now that's -- medicare did that. medicare started that. the rest of the industry fell in

line. i think we are going to find that as well with these models. >> i think we are going to need some help for consumers for a long time to come, and the whole idea almost of ombudsman or support is really important. there's an area where you also have to worry about again, the relationship between medicare and long-term care, long-term supports and services. in fact, i think one of the things that would be good for medicare to be able to do over time is to provide not only some of those ombudsman kind services but potentially even a structure to help people manage the long-term services. that might be an add-on program that people would enroll in and pay a modest, let's say income related payment for in which they could get additional help in managing that system. but i think the whole idea of managing it, to think of

managing it by yourself if you are sick is pretty scary. even if you are managing it with the help of a family member. i think that's an area where we really need to think about maybe even a model unto itself in terms of an innovation. >> i think we are wrapping up, because while we do have more questions, i don't think we can get to all of our questions. i want to thank the alliance for this really interesting discussion and the panelists. i want to give a plug for our primer which two of our panelists worked on. if you haven't learned everything you needed to know about payment delivery system reforms under medicare, here's your cheat sheet right here. i want to thank you and thank marilyn and everyone else. >> for those in the room you have that in your packet. for those not in the room, you can find that at www.allhealth.org. please join me in thanking our panelists for a really exciting conversation.

[ applause ] one more plug. to please fill out the shortened streamlined evaluation form. thank you very much. madam secretary, we gladly give 72 of our delegate votes to the next president of the united states.

♪ >> tomorrow morning on capitol hill, education secretary john king briefs members of the senate health, education, labor and pensions committee on implementation on the every student succeeds act which was passed last year. that's live, 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. also at 10:00 a.m., irs commissioner and other administration officials testify on how the irs is safeguarding taxpayer information this filing season. that's live on c-span 3.

america's role in the world and how the next president should address foreign policy challenges was the subject of an event at indiana university school of global and international studies. this is 90 minutes. so we're here today to talk about whether the obama approach, call it a doctrine, call it a policy, of scaling back of retrenchment and a repositioning is one that the next president ought to change and reconsider or maybe even deepen. and we have the perfect panel to engage in this conversation. to my right is jessica mathews. you have everybody's bio, so i'm just going to say a few highlights from my own personal

experience which i'm very honored to say i have with each of my colleagues here. jessica is the president of the carnegie endowment for international peace. she served in government as a columnist and been a driver on a wide range of foreign policy issues throughout her career. i encourage you to check out her writing in the new york review of books, it feels like it's every week. i guess you did have one the last couple of weeks. the most recent of which as far as i know is in the march 24 issue. it really tries to address and come to grips with some of the very issues we're going to be talking about today. also chris hill. chris, am i counting three-time ambassador? >> four. >> four-time ambassador, poland, iraq, macedonia. what am i missing? >> south korea. >> and south korea of course.