Arkansas Payment Improvement Initiative: Expanding Episodes To Other Clinical Areas

Editor’s note: This post is part of a periodic Health Affairs Blog series, looking at payment and delivery reforms in Arkansas and Oregon. The posts are based on evaluations of these reforms performed with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The authors of this post are part of the team evaluating the Arkansas model. After the first year of implementation of the episodic payment component of the multi-payer Arkansas Payment Improvement Initiative (APII), the state has identified both successes and challenges. While previous posts go into greater detail on the nuances of Arkansas’ approach to episodes and first year of implementation, we provide here a brief summary of the current state of implementation as well as some of the barriers and challenges to expanding episodic payment to other clinical areas. Arkansas launched its initial episodes of care in July 2012. Since then, a total of fifteen episodes have been implemented targeting clinical care in such diverse areas as pregnancy, elective orthopedic surgery, tonsillectomy, colonoscopy, acute asthma care, and attention deficit disorder. In 2014, both Arkansas Medicaid and Blue Cross Blue Shield released their final accounting for one year’s experience with the initial total cost of care episodes and also communicated financial results to individual practices. More details on the progress of episodes and other components of the APII are available in the first annual Statewide Tracking Report. In designi...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Innovations in Care Delivery Medicaid and CHIP Payment Policy APII Arkansas Payment Improvement Initiative CMMI CMS Payment Reform PCMH SIM Testing Award States Source Type: blogs