MIAMI—Late last year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) set a goal of having all Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in both Part A and Part B in an accountable care model by 2030.
Central to achieving that goal? The ability to coordinate and collaborate across different parts of the agency, CMS leaders said Monday during a session at the ViVE conference.
"I think we're giving a lot of thought to the models and the value-based care opportunities across CMS," said Liz Fowler, Ph.D., director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI).
Meena Seshamani, M.D., director of the Center for Medicare, said during the session that the partnership between her team and Fowler's is critical to making new models work. CMMI can take learnings from the Center for Medicare on where there is need, developing new approaches to test.
Meanwhile, CMMI offers a road map to scale and expand new models the Center for Medicare can follow, she said.
"There is tremendous power in partnering between the Center for Medicare and the Innovation Center," Seshamani said.
The approach to collaboration, particularly as it comes to accelerating the adoption of these value-based care models, falls into several buckets, Seshamani said. For one, alignment is key, both within different parts of CMS and with providers and other stakeholders.
She said aligning models with private Medicare Advantage plans is also central to CMS' thinking.
Incentives that encourage providers to participate to the fullest are also a crucial consideration, Seshamani said. Coming out of the pandemic, finding ways to encourage providers to work off-hours to support telehealth and other on-demand offerings has been a challenge CMS has been forced to grapple with, she said.
The third bucket, Seshamani said, is equity. The agency is striving to build and sustain models that can reach underserved populations as well as reexamining its existing models to ensure that equity is baked into the design. That extends to growing the number of providers working in rural and underserved regions, she said.
"There is a tremendous opportunity for more holistic care models to address the disparities that have led to these inequities," Seshamani said.