IMPACT’s Impact on Quality Measurement for Frail Elders

 Posted by on October 28, 2014  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 282014
 

By Joanne Lynn

What matters in the lives of frail elders centers on function — and understanding an elderly person’s course, over time, requires that everyone involved learn to measure functioning in the same way. That’s the core of the new Improved Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation (IMPACT) Act, passed by Congress in September 2014. Within a few years, we will have a uniform way of measuring what matters, including at least functional ability, across all post-hospital settings. The work that Medicare will have to do to implement IMPACT provides a remarkable opening for advocates to get Medicare measuring the things that matter.

About a decade ago, I started working at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in the Quality Measurement and Health Assessment Group. In straightening up my cubicle on the first day, I was dumbfounded to find a small cache of notepads emblazoned with “HCFA” and even more yellowed ones saying “Social Security Administration.” But the real gem was a set of transcripts from hearings nearly 30 years ago that addressed the wisdom of having a Uniform Assessment Instrument (UNAI) for the elderly. The arguments were cogent, and many of those testifying were well-known in geriatrics and gerontology to this day. But the world did not turn their way.

CMS ended up with some assessment instruments: the Minimum Data Set (MDS) for nursing homes, the Outcome Assessment and Information Set (OASIS) for home care, and the Inpatient Rehab Facility-Patient Assessment Instrument (IRF-PAI) for rehabilitation hospitals. There was little consistency between them. One instrument might ask whether an elder could do a task, another asked if he did do the task, and the last could ask how quickly he did it. If a person were in a sequence of settings that used different instruments, there was no way to see whether the person changed or it was just that the specific questions were different. This inconsistency was crazy! It precluded doing a serious study of outcomes across settings, characterizing populations of frail elders who used multiple settings, or even training practitioners to optimize the quality of data.

CMS has done one remarkable study, the Post-Acute Care Payment Reform Demonstration (PAC-PRD), in which elderly hospitalized persons were measured with a standardized tool, called the CARE Instrument. The findings have slowly surfaced and show that most outcomes are not affected by the setting of treatment, but the costs are dramatically different. This has led the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MEDPAC), in its June 2014 Report to Congress, to take notice and call for more site-neutral payments. This would mean that Medicare would not pay differently for treatment in settings that are not shown to make a difference in outcomes.

But for any rationalization of the increasingly expensive period just after hospitalization, one really needs the UNAI, a uniform way of measuring what matters, including at least functional ability, across all settings and time. That is the core of IMPACT. The Act requires that CMS promulgate a standard assessment and that all post-hospital providers use it and report data in that form. This meshes with an entirely separate project by the same name, Impact, an Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology project that has identified and standardized hundreds of elements that might be part of an assessment and care plan and is beginning to pilot-test the interoperability of records across sites in long-term care. The IMPACT Act makes UNAI real, with various deadlines, mostly 2018.

Having uniform data that will allow identification of functional disability and other important clinical categories creates the possibility of developing quality measures that reflect the priorities of frail elders, and the Act and the Executive Action Fact Sheet that accompany it give clear instruction to build measures of this sort.

How do the IMPACT Act and the associated executive actions give us a window of opportunity? IMPACT, in its section on quality measures, requires that care preferences of the individual and the family caregiver be part of the data to be reported at the time of a transition in setting of care. In a section on quality measure use, the Act requires that conditions of participation include procedures to address the patient’s treatment preferences and goals of care. The Act also calls for studies of the effects of socioeconomic factors and beneficiary activation on quality measures. The Act requires stakeholder input, and all of us are stakeholders. We hope to grow old, and we hope our loved ones do also.

What matters most when we are living with disabilities, chronic conditions, and frailty associated with advanced age? Most people still want to live a bit longer if possible. But most of us become more aware with age that we are working with a truncated timeline and long-term outcomes are no longer relevant. For that and other reasons, many additional considerations start crowding the stage. Some want to be sure that a disabled adult son has assets to live on; others have no dependents. Some want to honor their faith traditions; others want to solidify their departure from those beliefs. The endless variations make it impossible to have one care plan that fits all people.

So why do we now measure quality for frail elderly people as if everyone wanted mainly just to live longer with better health? Often, our metrics just comply with professional (mostly physician) guidelines on how to take care of (somewhat younger) bodies. People become more and more individualized with their particular family, finances, dreams, and fears as they age. We really must learn to measure the quality of health care by the degree to which it serves the individual’s priorities. We must learn to ask, “What matters to you, and what matters most to you?” and to judge quality by how well the services actually deliver on what matters most.

Could we do that? Sure! First, we need to document what matters most to the frail elderly person (and family) and what strategies will most likely accomplish the feat — commonly termed an “assessment and care plan.” Then we need to measure whether the elderly person (and family, as appropriate) feels that the services help to achieve what matters most. We could start with a simple scale: “Working against my interests,” “Not clear or not particularly helpful,” and “Completely or mostly aligned with what matters to me.” We would learn how to do it better, but the important thing is to start caring about what matters to the individual person.

Of course, some things are important to so many people that we might learn to measure them across the frail elder population. Metrics of “what really matters to me” could include, for example, “the rate at which the care system spends down my financial assets,” “the likelihood that I can stay in my home as long as I want to,” “my confidence in having adequate preparation for adverse events and adequate backup for challenges,” and “the stress that my family and friends feel as they try to ensure that I have what I need.” Most people care about avoiding falls and injuries and living where they want to live. While we are at it, let’s start measuring important things about family caregivers: availability, skills, stresses, and challenges. These are what most often really matter when you are living your last years with disabilities and limitations. How different this is from the usual “percentage with diabetes under control” or “percentage with colon cancer screenings”!

Let’s do what we can to help CMS commit to building the metrics that we need. Here are some suggestions:

  1. Contact the organizations to which you belong and encourage them to include advocacy on behalf of quality measures appropriate for frail elderly people in their work with Medicare and Medicaid.
  2. Write to CMS and your congressional representatives to push for metrics that really reflect the concerns of frail elderly people and their families.
  3. If you are funding or doing research in this arena, stretch the scope to include what really matters.
  4. When you look at Nursing Home Compare, Home Health Compare, or any of the quality information for the public sites, send a comment to CMS, your congressional representatives, or your Quality Improvement Network that the metrics are not yet what you hope to see. You can offer some of the ones that I listed above as examples of what we should have.
  5. Some responsive and forceful advocacy for frail elderly people is at Consumer Voice, OWL, and Gray Panthers and caregiver groups. Join them and encourage their work in these arenas.
  6. Write to us with suggestions and plans. The time is upon us! We will watch for CMS requests for information, proposed regulations or conditions of participation, and RFPs. You can also let us know if you see something potentially important going by.

This is important, and an opportunity has opened up that might move us along well.

Want to know more?

Post-Acute Care Payment Reform Demonstration: Final Report
http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/Reports/Research-Reports-Items/PAC_Payment_Reform_Demo_Final.html

CARE Instrument
http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/Post-Acute-Care-Quality-Initiatives/CARE-Item-Set-and-B-CARE.html

Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MEDPAC) June 2014 Report to Congress
http://www.medpac.gov/docs/default-source/reports/june-2016-report-to-the-congress-medicare-and-the-health-care-delivery-system.pdf?sfvrsn=0.pdf?sfvrsn=2

Standards & Interoperability (S&I) Framework
https://www.healthit.gov/topic/interoperability/standards-interoperability-si-framework

White House Fact Sheet on Executive Actions to Improve Quality of Care
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/10/06/fact-sheet-administration-announces-new-executive-actions-improve-qualit

PDF Download of the full text of HR 4994 (the Act)
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr4994enr/pdf/BILLS-113hr4994enr.pdf

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The IMPACT Bill, the BACPAC Proposal, and Why It Matters Where PAC Savings Go

 Posted by on July 9, 2014  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Jul 092014
 

by Anne H. Montgomery and Joanne Lynn, MD, MA, MS

Congress is gearing up to put a legislative glide path in place that is intended to culminate in major reform of Medicare’s post-acute care (PAC) payment system. Following several months of soliciting and reviewing comments on a discussion draft, the “Improve Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation Act” (H.R. 4994/S. 2553) was introduced on June 26. Sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), together with Reps. Dave Camp (R-MI) and Sander Levin (D-MI), the IMPACT proposal (https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-bill/2553) is believed to have good odds of being enacted during the 113th congressional session.

One of IMPACT’s primary goals is to establish a system of uniform assessment in the PAC sector (or perhaps more accurately the “after- hospital” sector) along with improved quality measurement. This information, which would be transmitted to CMS and available for analysis and research, would be used to help redesign payments across skilled nursing facilities, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, long-term care hospitals and home health agencies, with recommendations due from CMS and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission by 2022.

“Without comparable information across PAC settings, policymakers and providers cannot determine whether patients treated and the care provided in different settings is, in fact, the same or whether one PAC setting is more appropriate,” a summary of the bill notes.

“Absent this information, it is difficult to move forward with PAC payment reforms.”

This is true enough: Clinicians and thoughtful experts knowledgeable about the care of older adults have advocated a uniform assessment for several decades, and having a high-quality, standardized tool in hand would enable better prognostication and decision support.

But there are other factors that could heavily influence the way that PAC reform played out. One is the “Bundling and Coordinating Post-Acute care Act of 2014” (BACPAC) bill (https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/4673) introduced on May 19 by Rep. McKinley (R-WV) and Tom Price (R-GA). As proposed, the policy would give control of PAC services to a PAC coordinator – which could be a hospital, health insurance issuer, third-party benefit manager or PAC provider; no government entities or locally-managed coalition efforts are envisioned. PAC coordinators would be given full authority to authorize, deny and coordinate all PAC services for 90 days post-discharge. These services are defined as post-hospital extended care services, home health services, inpatient services provided in a rehabilitation facility, inpatient hospital services provided by a long-term care hospital, durable medical equipment, outpatient prescription drugs and biologicals, and skilled nursing facility services. Physician services and hospice are not included. Standardized assessment is called for, but there is no mention of the information being transmitted to CMS.

Starting in January 2016, PAC coordinators receiving a single payment from the HHS Secretary for PAC services would manage PAC services within a designated “PAC area” (no standardized geographic definition of these areas is provided), and would reimburse “PAC providers” (providers or suppliers furnishing PAC services) at current rates.

After January 2019, PAC coordinators would be empowered to negotiate rates and savings targets with PAC providers. Under the terms of these negotiated agreements, PAC coordinators would keep up to 70% of any savings realized, with 10% or more to PAC providers, 10% or more to the PAC physician, and 10% or more to the discharging hospital. Although unlikely to be enacted in this Congress, BACPAC will probably be reintroduced in the 114th session. And while it may be financially attractive for certain providers, beneficiaries would not see financial gains, and the benefits from better “navigation” of services are not well established. Nonetheless, unless careful attention is paid to the implications of the bill, it is even possible that some of the proposed reforms could be implemented administratively.

But the most interesting issue is where PAC dollars that are saved will go before any of the proposed legislative reforms culminate in a rebased PAC financing system. In the IMPACT bill, financing reforms are more than seven years away. This provides a window of opportunity for capturing large savings in this sector, now that research and private companies has established that substantial efficencies in the PAC sector are feasible.

This raises two related questions: Are there models already in use that are capturing PAC savings, and if so, where are the savings going? The answers are “yes” and “to private investors.” More specifically, evidence-based proprietary protocols are now being used by some risk-bearing contractors and managed care plans to significantly reduce PAC expenditures (http://healthaffairs.org/blog/author/jlynn/). Under these arrangements, savings from taxpayer-financed PAC services are not being reinvested in further improvements, but rather are being funneled via contractual agreements directly into private pockets.

Business as usual, you say? Classic American capitalism? Certainly. But for policymakers and other guardians of the public purse and the public welfare, the merits of this approach may best be examined in a larger framework: the future of the U.S. health and long-term care systems after 2020, when the largest generation of older adults in U.S. history will rapidly drive up demand for a mix of services that are aimed at controlling chronic conditions and mitigating the impact of functional disability. Since evidence suggests that about 45% of the roughly 23% of total Medicare dollars that are spent on PAC services can be harvested
(http://healthforum.brandeis.edu/meetings/materials/2014-18 march/naviHealth.Scully.pdf), this represents an important opportunity to have a robust policy discussion about whether PAC savings — or a portion of them – could be set aside to re-engineer the health, PAC and post-PAC (i.e., long-term care) systems into better-organized integrated care systems.

The sheer size of the possible PAC savings that are available to possibly be captured over the next seven to 10 years – roughly 10% of all Medicare spending – makes this a particularly important case to debate thoroughly – rather than merely standing by and letting the money quietly disappear.

The reality is that today, we are still billions of dollars away from having the necessary infrastructure to grow our modestly-sized coordinated care and shared savings models into the stable integrated care system that will be needed for tomorrow’s large cohort of older adults. For American health care to have become so chaotic and poorly designed that private companies can design ways to pull about 10% of Medicare spending out of services and mostly into profits points out just how poorly we have built our care system for complex chronic conditions.

Some private gain using public dollars may be necessary to catalyze reforms of the PAC sector. However, the size of the looming potential loss for the Medicare Trust Fund is stunningly large, especially when the services provided are primarily decision support and navigation. If, instead, the strategy can be shifted to reinvesting a hefty portion of realized savings in care systems that are deliberately designed to deliver consistent and reliable supports for frail elders and their families, while also reducing their overall health care costs, our future will look very different.

One such comprehensive and community-focused system, the MediCaring model, has been developed by Altarum’s Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness [now Program to Improve Eldercare]. Others may emerge from the dual eligibles demonstration and ongoing research efforts, while smaller-scale plans such as PACE may devise successful expansion strategies. These models spring from efforts to serve the target population, rather than opportunistically attending only to the happenstance period after hospitalization.

Making these and other high-quality comprehensive models larger and economically viable and sustainable – capable of both driving down unnecessary utilization while improving outcomes — will take ingenuity and innovation, significantly more efficient deployment of services and workforce, and greater flexibility in how existing financial resources are used. Given the likelihood that Congress will not want to make substantial resources for further reforms available in the form of new programs and large grants, this is an important time to think carefully about how greater efficiencies in the PAC sector can both be reliably achieved and how any resulting savings can be best leveraged to build the care system we need to handle the demands of the “age boom.”

 

key words: Joanne Lynn, IMPACT, BACPAC, MediCaring model, congress

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