The Department of Health and Human Services, building off work started by private insurers and Medicaid in Vermont, finally is starting its medical home demonstration.
It will be interesting to see if universal alignment of payment systems achieves the efficiencies and care improvement that we are all hoping for. According to HHS press release:
This demonstration will mark the first time Medicare will be a full partner in these experiments and the practice model would, for the first time, align compensation offered by all insurers to primary care physicians. Instead of each third party payer and public program adopting different approaches, using different ways of measuring performance and creating different payment incentives, multi-payer programs will join together to work toward common goals to improve the delivery of care.