http://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/Prevention/51910?
Medicare providers could could get a bump in their paychecks for keeping patients' heart attack and stroke risks in check, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced.
Providers are already paid bonuses for assessing certain cardiovascular metrics, said Darshak Sanghavi, MD, director of the Preventive and Population Health Models Group at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI).
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"They get paid just a little bit extra if they get your
blood pressure under a certain target," he said, and to tackle
cholesterol as well as ask about smoking, he added.While providers do a "relatively good job," with this, the Million Hearts Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) Risk Reduction model aims to reward providers for leveraging these metrics in a meaningful way to actually alter 10-year risk scores.
Sanghavi announced the new payment model during a panel on disease prevention at the Bipartisan Policy Center last week.
Each year, 610,000 people die of heart disease in the U.S. -- that's one in every four deaths -- totaling around $315.4 billion annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Services (CDC), noted the CMS press release.
Using data such as age, gender, ethnicity, smoking habits, cholesterol level, and blood pressure, providers can calculate a score that predicts the likelihood a patient will encounter cardiovascular issues. "In other words, we can see into the future right now and tell you in the next 10 years what is your risk of heart attack or stroke," Sanghavi said.
Providers will be rewarded for the 10-year absolute risk reduction of their practice. The basic premise is to marry the incentives with long-term outcomes, Sanghavi said
The original Million Hearts initiative began under former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in 2011. The new model spans 5 years and uses a randomized, control design involving 300,000 Medicare beneficiaries from roughly 720 practices. The providers in the control group will also be paid a monthly per-beneficiary payment. The ultimate aim of the program is to stop 1 million heart attacks and strokes by 2017.
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