At the recent Becker's Hospital Review Annual Meeting, Jon Pearce from Singletrack Analytics and Kelly Price from DataGen presented a session on "Leveraging Lessons Learned from Medicare's Bundled Payment Program".

The Medicare Bundled Payment for Care Improvement (BPCI) initiative provides opportunities for participants to create financial advantages in several ways. This article describes the categories of these opportunities, the differences in strategies for approaching the opportunities, and some limitations on their potential for success.

The current issue of Hospitals and Health Networks magazine contains an informative article about the broader issues involved in contracting with payers on a "bundled payment" basis.

It is now January 2013 and the “No-Risk” BPCI program has begun; how much more (or less) do we know about this program than we did nine months ago when CMS first issued its Request for Applications?  In this paper, we will list what we know and highlight the remaining uncertainties about the Medicare BPCI program.

Data:

CMS has released some information about the data to be provided to BPCI applicant awardees.

Our friends at Strategic Business Alternatives have written an excellent series of articles about the opportunities and strategies for reducing 30-day readmissions.  In their three-part series on Medicare ACO Management: 30 Day All Cause Readmissions, they discuss the potential opportunity for cost savings, review several different models for addressing the problem, and some of the human and technological tools necessary to add

CMS has recently circulated an email to BPCI participants requesting comments on the data formats that will apparently be utilized for the reconciliation data distribution to be made in March, as well as the ongoing data to be provided to BPCI participants.

Throughout the BPCI application process, Singletrack Analytics and our partners at DataGen have maintained an ongoing dialogue with CMS about issues related to the bundled payment implementation process.  Below are some of the issues discussed along with our interpretation of the response.

Price Determination