May 082019
 
Portrait of Dr. Joanne Lynn
Dr. Joanne Lynn MD

By Joanne Lynn

May 7, 2019

CMMI has announced that they will soon call for proposals for a bevy of new payment models, aiming to reduce hospitalization without harming quality by allowing a great deal of flexibility by practicing primary care clinicians for Part A and Part B services in Medicare and by allowing contracting for services for larger groups of beneficiaries. Effectively, CMMI is offering practitioners and other stakeholders a group of models that blend capitation and fee-for-service, with payments generally depending upon lowering hospital use, meeting quality standards, and making certain continuity services available (e.g., 24/7 on-call with the record and electronic records with interoperability). While many of the details are not yet clear, I believe that these models could offer some important opportunities for moving toward optimal care for elders living with serious illnesses and disabilities.
The publications so far have not really dealt with long-term care, supportive services in the community, or integration with Medicaid. But they also have not made these things any more difficult.
As a very brief overview, CMMI is offering two groups of models: Primary Care First and Direct Contracting. This table summarizes what I’ve been able to learn as to the characteristics of the proposed models. All models appear to require having some experience with value-based payments, having certified electronic records with interoperability and connection to the local HIE – and providing primary care. From one perspective, Primary Care First is a successor and spread of CPC+, and Direct Contracting is a successor and spread of NextGen ACOs. More information can be found on these URLs:

https://innovation.cms.gov/initiatives/primary-care-first-model-options/

https://innovation.cms.gov/initiatives/direct-provider-contracting/

And here is an introductory table.

2019 CMMI Proposals Table

Note that practices now participating in CPC+ cannot join Primary Care First until 2021. The areas where Primary Care First will be allowed in 2020 are these:

Alaska (statewide), Arkansas (statewide), California (statewide), Colorado (statewide), Delaware (statewide), Florida (statewide), Greater Buffalo region (New York), Greater Kansas City region (Kansas and Missouri), Greater Philadelphia region (Pennsylvania), Hawaii (statewide), Louisiana (statewide), Maine (statewide), Massachusetts (statewide), Michigan (statewide), Montana (statewide), Nebraska (statewide), New Hampshire (statewide), New Jersey (statewide), North Dakota (statewide), North Hudson-Capital region (New York), Ohio and Northern Kentucky region (statewide in Ohio and partial state in Kentucky), Oklahoma (statewide), Oregon (statewide), Rhode Island (statewide), Tennessee (statewide), and Virginia (statewide).

The RFI for the Geographic Direct Contracting Model is at https://innovation.cms.gov/Files/x/dc-geographicpbp-rfi.pdf DATES: Comment Date: To be assured consideration, comments must be received by Thursday, May 23, 2019 at 11:59 pm EST. ADDRESSES: Comments should be submitted electronically to [email protected].

There are dozens of ways to implement these, and I hope that CMMI will allow diversity and will be clever in the evaluations, aiming to harvest insight and wisdom as well as comparisons with past performance and unaffected beneficiaries. However, if they allow contractors to put together the geographic and the serious illness endeavor, we could have a model that would fit the seriously disabled or slowly dying elder well. We could have communities with exemplary performance within a few years, and tremendous experience to build upon.

I would very much like to know whether you, the reader, are in a position to encourage potential sites to be ready to submit a letter of intent soon after the RFPs come out in June (for all except the Geographic Direct Contracting). If you are interested in shaping the RFP for Geographic Direct Contracting, the deadline for comments is May 23, 2019. If our coordinating information is useful to you or a colleague, please be in touch with us at [email protected]. We aim to put together communications as appropriate in order to accumulate best practice ideas concerning eldercare and to devise approaches that might allow optimization of local care systems quickly! We are happy to help any organization focusing on elders who are living with frailty, disabilities, and illnesses that need long-term supports and services and generally are eventually contributing to the end of life.

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Dec 032018
 
Nick Macchione, Joanne Lynn
Authors Nick & Joanne

By Nick Macchione and Joanne Lynn

This blog entry was written for the Milbank Memorial Fund and is reposted here with permission.

State and local leaders who aim to improve population health must help older Americans live well with the challenges associated with aging. Given the rapidly rising number of elders, local governments have remarkable opportunities to facilitate improvements in health and quality of life for elderly people living with disabilities and serious illnesses. In March 2016, the county of San Diego joined both the AARP Network of Age-Friendly Communities and the Dementia Friendly America network to create the Age Well San Diego initiative. Age Well San Diego expands on the foundation of the County’s Live Well San Diego vision of a region that is “Building Better Health, Living Safely, and Thriving,” which was first established in 2010.

Age Well San Diego is a five-year collaborative process of assessing needs and working with community partners to develop, implement, and evaluate an action plan. With support from the San Diego Foundation and AARP, the county’s Health and Human Services Agency first held an Aging Summit to introduce the concepts of age-friendly and dementia-friendly communities. Additionally, the county held listening sessions to garner feedback from the public and arranged targeted focus groups to gain input from racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities, which often are not well represented. The planning sessions included a broad array of county departments. Live Well San Diego has long recognized partners, community groups, and other health-related organizations. The variety of input led to a comprehensive “Age Well San Diego Action Plan” that was approved by the County Board of Supervisors in May 2018.

The Age Well San Diego Action Plan identifies five priority themes: health and community support, housing, social participation, transportation, and being dementia-friendly. Goals, action steps, timelines, and metrics to measure success have been developed for each theme, and dementia-friendly strategies are woven through the other four areas. During the next three years, the county will work with community partners, interested stakeholders, and older adults to implement the plan, coming together to build age-friendly, dementia-friendly communities that will benefit residents of all ages. The county will continue to work closely with community partners, government officials, professionals and older adults to build a brighter future for people of all ages.

Guided in part by this Action Plan, San Diego County is making major strides in aging well. For example, the county has one of the lowest rates of hospitalization of elderly people in the nation, a health information exchange that includes data from county services, and much of the county’s public education system has focused on preventing falls, the dangers of inactivity, and hypertension. With the focus on older adults, and an added emphasis on those with Alzheimer’s and dementia, the county is creating an environment in which the elderly are better supported with wrap-around services, thus bolstering and strengthening their ability to remain in their homes and communities throughout their lifespan. Moreover, Age Well initiatives help older residents avoid preventable illnesses, stay engaged in their local communities, and obtain adequate support in the last phase of life.

Despite progress, the county still faces a substantial set of challenges in ensuring supportive care for people living with the disabilities associated with aging. Scores of supportive service organizations serve elders, but their capacities and eligibility requirements vary or change and are not coordinated. Medical care systems are mostly local, and they have cooperated on projects to improve emergency preparedness and care transitions. Most of the MediCal managed care plans, however, are owned outside of the county and are not yet well-connected with local services. Elders and their caregivers are too often left frustrated and anxious, and too many must cope with living without essential services. The county is exploring how to monitor how well elders are doing, both when they are still robust and when they are living with serious illnesses and worsening disabilities. While addressing these ongoing challenges, San Diego County remains an example to others looking at what local governments can do for aging populations.

The Aging Well planning process makes it clear: if a health care financing and service delivery system were designed now for elderly people who might live for years with serious chronic conditions and disabilities, it would not be based on traditional fee-for-service Medicare. Instead, it would prioritize ensuring that adequate food, shelter, personal hygiene, eyeglasses, hearing aids, foot and dental care were all available. The affected population and their families would be involved in deciding which medical services help people live well and need to be readily available, and which services have little impact, given a patient’s age and condition, and need not be readily available. For people who can’t leave their homes, services need to come to them, with appropriately prompt response times.

Optimal policies must go beyond standard preventive health care services and medical care delivery to involve social determinants of health, including education, living or working conditions, and societal connectedness. The built environment, the local workforce, and the services available shape the experience of elders and their families in profound ways. Adapted housing and transportation for the elderly, for example, enable community living, while shortages push elders into nursing homes. When the elderly have access to parks and community spaces, they are more likely to get physical activity and engage with others, reducing isolation and depression.

These ideas are coming together in the MediCaring® Communities reform proposal. The MediCaring® Communities concept proposes additional reforms, including capturing funds saved from avoiding wasted and low-value medical care and instead investing them in community-based services. Currently, health insurance ensures that a frail elderly person can get any costly drug or surgery, but that same person often faces challenges in finding shelter, personal help with bathing, or dental care because these essential services have inadequate funding.

San Diego’s social services and its health care providers have long been committed to enhancing the health of its people, as demonstrated by Age Well San Diego and other collaborative and innovative endeavors. However, the county’s ability to test more fundamental reforms is constrained by established processes and financing. Creating a set of reliable and efficient social arrangements to support a large and rapidly growing number of frail and disabled elderly people will require the opportunity to test substantial innovations. The MediCaring® Communities model provides such an opportunity.

The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services should enable a few communities, like San Diego, to work intensely with their elderly population to demonstrate how a highly reliable and efficient aging care system could be developed for the elders who must live with disabilities and illnesses. Funding should aim to stay within current aggregate costs to elders, families, communities, states, and the federal government, but some funds would be directed to reforms that benefit all elders and their families—such as workforce training, caregiver support, dental care, and so forth. Many communities likely would join and build this future—just in time for the aging of America.

Nick Macchione serves as San Diego County’s director of the Health and Human Services Agency, which serves over 1.3 million people. He is also the architect and strategist of “Live Well San Diego.” He is a fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives, a Public Health Leadership Scholar with the Public Health Institute/Federal CDC, and a Creating Healthier Communities Fellow of the American Hospital Association. Macchione holds master’s degrees from Columbia University and NYU specializing in leadership, management, and policy. He serves vice chair of the Milbank Memorial Funds’ Reforming States Group.

Read Joanne Lynn‘s biography.

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May 172018
 
Picture of Sonja Felton
Sonja Love Felton

By Sonja Love Felton, LMSW, MPA
Executive Director of Huron Valley PACE
huronvalleypace.org

Huron Valley PACE, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, is a young PACE organization – we were established only 4 years ago. However, we’ve been moving quickly since the day we opened our doors. Most readers likely know that PACE is an acronym for Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, a tremendously innovative program that became federal law back in 1997. Today, we provide comprehensive, high-quality, person- and family-centered care, mostly to dually eligible beneficiaries 55 and older – but as the Executive Director of Huron Valley PACE, I can attest that we have larger ambitions.

Here’s how we plan to grow: In March, we broke ground on a new wing that will allow us to enroll an additional 120 participants next year. Today, we serve 162 participants. Beyond enrolling more dually eligible participants, we are tackling the challenge of identifying policy pathways and implementing changes that will allow us to expand to serve a Medicare-only population. With our country’s age wave steadily gathering momentum, we want to build our capacity to enroll seniors who are not Medicaid eligible – either because they do not require a nursing home level of care or because they are not financially eligible (less than $2,250 in gross monthly income and less than $2,000 in assets).

To do this work, we are partnering with Altarum in a project supported by a grant from the Michigan Health Endowment Fund to find innovative ways to expand availability and affordability of PACE services to more elders and people with disabilities in our local service area. In our work to date, we have identified a major barrier for enrollment of Medicare-only participants – the cost of prescription drug coverage. Here’s the dilemma: dually eligible participants have all of their Part D costs covered, but due to conflicting provisions in the original PACE statute and the 2003 law that established the Part D program, Medicare-only participants are now forced to pay exorbitantly high premiums for their drug coverage — $1099 per month in 2018 in our program. That compares to the average $45.15 for a local Part D Prescription Drug Plan (PDP).

To resolve the conflict – which arises because PACE prohibits payment of co-pays and deductibles, and the Part D law requires that co-pays and deductibles be paid to qualify for discounts during the “doughnut hole” coverage gap as well as for catastrophic coverage – Altarum and Huron Valley PACE crafted a PACE and Part D waiver that we have submitted to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). In developing a waiver package, we also worked with the actuarial firm Milliman, Inc., to develop a pricing strategy that would allow Medicare-only participants to pay us a premium that covers buying a market-based plan and also covers out-of-pocket copays, deductibles, and over-the-counter medications. The monthly amount would total about $320. We think this is a creative solution that would allow people to keep their Medicare Part D plan and remain enrolled in PACE. We are excited about having the support of the PACE Association of Michigan (PAM), the National PACE Association (NPA), and Representative Debbie Dingell for this waiver.

In 2011, CMS approved a similar waiver for Medicare-eligible veterans, so that they could receive their drug coverage from the VA’s very affordable, high-quality prescription drug coverage program. As of mid-May 2018, we are awaiting news from CMS about our ability to move forward and begin to offer this innovative, lower-cost prescription drug option.

Another exciting development in Michigan that will make PACE more available to frail older adults is a revision to Michigan’s Nursing Facility Transition (NFT) Program which will include PACE as an option for people moving out of nursing homes and back to the community. Much of the NFT work Michigan has done – and thousands of people have already been helped to move back to the community from a nursing home – has been under the federally enacted and funded Money Follows the Person (MFP) program. While the current version of the MFP program is expiring, federal policy makers and advocates are optimistic that a new version of MFP will be forthcoming. Including PACE as an option for people who want to move from nursing homes back to the community will provide a more complete and choice-based set of options for our elders and people with disabilities.

Finally, for people who would be served well in PACE but have a bit too much income to qualify for Medicaid, Huron Valley PACE and Altarum are working with national and state level experts on Medicaid policy to develop a pathway that would enable the participant and Medicaid to share in the costs. Currently, these individuals eventually have to use a nursing home, almost all of their income is paid to the nursing home, and Medicaid picks up the rest. The cost to Medicaid would be lower in PACE and the elderly person would keep living in his or her home much longer.

PACE has been successful in providing comprehensive, coordinated, customized, high quality social and medical care to some of our most vulnerable citizens. Huron Valley PACE is pleased to be a part of this work with Altarum to explore groundbreaking ways to make PACE more available and affordable for a broader array of people who need such support and care in our community. Once we blaze the trail, many other states and PACE programs can make PACE much more broadly available.

For information concerning PACE at the national level, visit the National PACE Association website

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Jan 232018
 
A photograph of a group of Zuni elders
Zuni Elders Community

On December 5, 2017 the “It Takes YOUR Community” symposium was hosted by Altarum’s Center for Elder Care & Advanced Illness in Washington, DC. This post provides an edited videocast of the event and the edited transcript with links to presentation slides as well as a Resource POD. The primary goal of this symposium was to bring together fellow stakeholders and interest groups involved in addressing the needs of the growing elder population at the policy and grassroots level, and to discuss possible strategies as to how we can stay engaged and think about building community-anchored care systems across the country.

Our diverse and dynamic group of speakers and panelists provided in-depth insight, as well as actionable and practical tools of advocacy models necessary to plan for the community-based health and long-term service and support (LTSS) needs of a growing older population.

The Symposium Transcript has been edited for clarity and readability and includes links the background resources that presenters provided [for additional resources see our Resource POD]. Additionally, here is the final agenda, for your reference.

The Full Videocast can be viewed or you can use the individual links to the agenda below (so you can select which panel discussions you wish to watch). Click on the discussion title [blue text] to link to start the recording of that discussion. You can navigate in the whole recording from any of the links below, for example you can view the entire session by clicking the opening link.

0:00 – 6:29 ~ Opening: Communities and the “Age Wave”
6:30 – 1:04:40 ~ Three Communities: What Are the Driving Factors?
1:04:41 – 1:52:52 ~ The Role of the Federal Government in Supporting Community-Anchored Care
1:52:53 – 2:31:46 ~ Panel Discussion: Drilling Down
2:31:47 – 3:10:04 ~ Financing Projections by Communities and Getting a Handle on Services and Costs: How You Can Approach This as a Community Planning Initiative
3:11:46 – 3:47:28 ~ Where Can Communities Go To Find Some Money to Get Started?
3:47:28 – 3:49:44 ~ Leveraging Action

Copyright © 2017 Altarum, All rights reserved.

Altarum is a national nonprofit whose mission is to create a better, more sustainable future through ideas and action that transform health and health care in America. Learn more at www.altarum.org

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Dec 122017
 
Anne Montgomery portrait
Anne Montgomery

By Anne Montgomery [as posted on the American Society on Aging (ASA) website]

As evidence accumulates on how community-based organizations (CBO) can cost effectively meet the medical and long-term care needs of older adults through supportive services, the importance of linking multiple data streams across settings becomes clear. But until recently, policy barriers hampered effective collaboration and communication between the healthcare sector and CBOs.

Read the full post at the American Society on Aging (ASA) website:

Overcoming Barriers: The Case for Enhancing Collaboration and Communication Between Medical and Community Settings

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Mar 012017
 
Portrait of Dr. Joanne Lynn
Joanne Lynn, MD

By Joanne Lynn

Most of us now reading this will get the extraordinary privilege of being able to live into old age. For nearly all of human history, few people lived to be old, and even fewer lived long with serious disabilities. Now, most of us will have a substantial period of increasing disability at the end of long lives. The experience of people with serious illnesses and disabilities in old age (“frail elders”) and the experience of caregiving for an elderly person are profoundly shaped by the availability of supportive resources and appropriate medical care in the local community.

For example, some communities have ready availability of services such as home-delivered meals and wheelchair-adapted housing, while others have exceedingly long waiting lists for often-inadequate services. Some communities have developed substantial geriatric medical care, including house calls and telemedicine, while others rely on the hospital for every complication. Little is known about the experiences of elders and their caregivers in the usual community, since very little is captured about the community’s experience of this part of life in conventional surveys and reports. Many health systems and communities like to take on the responsibility of monitoring and improving the care system for disabled elders and their caregivers, rather than just offering rescue services for serious and often preventable complications; but they find that the reliable metrics needed to guide improvement are unavailable.

We’ve given some thought to potential ways to meet these needs, and here’s what seems possible and affordable in order to make a measurement dashboard to guide improving a community’s eldercare system. First, one could mine large existing databases, such as Medicare and Medicaid claims, Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) home health agency assessments, and Minimum Data Set (MDS) nursing home assessments. Then, one could monitor demand for and performance of key service providers, such as wait lists for home-delivered meals or availability of wheelchair-adapted housing. Third, the community could interview family and caregivers for a sample of elderly decedents and describe the experience of the last couple of years. This strategy would sample those who received few services and demanded little, and it would allow exploration of critical issues such as bankrupting elders and families and providing culturally appropriate services.

Our last data source, learning by aggregating care plans, is a bit beyond current implementation, but it could enable the opportunity for substantial monitoring and improvement efforts. We envision having records with the key elements of service needs for nearly all frail and disabled elders in a geographic area. Being able to combine them electronically would yield rich data in order to summarize needs, services provided, gaps, oversupply, and quality problems—both for the whole community and by mapping to clarify the locus of some issues. If, for example, the community has 500 elderly people so disabled that they should have medical care at home, and the community had current capacity only for 100, then one could identify and map the areas of need and examine the current and potential supply options to address the gaps. Furthermore, with data on demand and supply for a dozen important service needs, the community would be able to set priorities for investments in public resources. You can read more about how this kind of community management would work in our book.

Of course this work requires adequate care plans, preferably in a format that allows electronic identification of the plan and its elements. At present, too few elders living with advanced illnesses have reasonably comprehensive care plans created, and even fewer have them written down, even in narrative form. We’ve also realized that shortages of, or quality shortcomings with, important services are addressed explicitly or noted in the record. Thus, a person who really would do better with door-to-door wheelchair transportation and lives in a community lacking this service will instead have the substitute arrangements in his care plan, such as “transportation relies on the availability of his son-in-law Tom, so appointments need to revolve around Tom’s availability.” The shortage of appropriate transportation options might be inferred but is not likely to be explicitly stated. Similarly, the lack of respite for a caregiver will not be noted. Therefore, additional work is needed to develop comprehensive care planning, which includes collaboration with the regulatory and technical bodies that are working on the standards for care planning.

With funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, we are working to develop the methodology to do care plan aggregation. We are actively seeking communities that would like to help us develop these methods by letting us try it out with their population. We want to know what information from care plans you think would be most relevant and how you’d want to act on that knowledge, what entity in your community might be able and willing to act, and whether it is worthwhile to push for better and more standardized care plans.

Please email us at [email protected] if you know of or belong to an organization that might be able to work with us.

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Jul 262016
 
MediCaring Communities cover

By Joanne Lynn

Nearly all Americans want a long life, and many of us will live into our 80’s and beyond. But as a society, we have avoided addressing the challenges of living well in the last years at a cost that our families and taxpayers can sustain. That’s about to change.

A new MediCaring Communities book from the Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness, authored by Dr. Joanne Lynn, provides a comprehensive blueprint for re-engineering — in highly practical, doable terms — how to better organize service delivery and current publicly financed programs so that all Americans can count on living comfortably and meaningfully through the end of life. MediCaring Communities are deliberately designed to customize care around the priorities of elders and their families. The model also offers local organizations and governments a financial lifeline and a way to share in managing a care system so that it is as reliable and efficient as possible.

The MediCaring Communities model takes the best of “lessons learned” and “best practices” from the public literature and on-the-ground experience gained from working with frail elders and across many services systems. It addresses the unique needs of elders who need both medical care and long-term care through organizations that are either adapted or established de novo in order to deliver tailored geriatric and supportive services. These services are in turn modulated by each elder’s care plan – defined as a record of services that comport with an individual’s treatment preferences and quality of life goals. The substantial Medicare savings that result from lower utilization of high-cost services and improved, appropriate geriatric care, are then repurposed and reinvested in vital and underfunded homecare and related social supports, including home delivered meals, transportation, and training and respite for family caregivers.

Virtually everyone agrees this type of care is what they want for themselves and for their loved ones. We know exactly where we need to go, but how do we get there?

PACE Expansion

The Program of All-Inclusive care for the Elderly (PACE) provides one opportunity. PACE already has a solid reputation as a comprehensive program primarily for dually eligible beneficiaries who need medical care and long-term services and supports (LTSS). With the November 2015 passage of the PACE Innovation Act (P.L. 114-85), which brought innovations with PACE under the authority of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), the federal government now has streamlined authority to fund innovations in the PACE model. With a green light from CMMI, PACE programs will be able to test expansions in two key populations: (1) Medicare beneficiaries or “pre duals,” who need LTSS services, and (2) dually eligible beneficiaries who are not yet disabled enough to meet their state’s Medicaid definition of a nursing home level of care.
If PACE scales to take on these new populations, the program’s advisory board could readily evolve to become independent and reflect a broader community perspective on frail elders. In so doing, it could take on greater responsibility for monitoring and improving eldercare services across the community. Such PACE expansion programs could show how to anchor a comprehensive model of care for all similarly situated frail elders in the area, whether or not they are disabled enough to qualify for a Medicaid nursing home level of care.

ACOs and MCOs

Another mainstream Medicare model is an Accountable Care Organization or a managed care plan. Either could sponsor a MediCaring Community by accounting for frail elders in a defined geographic area separately from their overall business, and establishing an integrated clinical and LTSS delivery system in that community. The savings harvested from avoiding low-value, overutilized services would be calculated annually. A share would go to Medicare, but most would be retained for reinvestment in social and supportive services. Challenges associated with an adapted ACO model are that the usual ACO has little track record to build upon for constructing an independent board and for collaboration with LTSS providers, but other organizations in their communities would likely have strengths in these areas and be willing to collaborate. ACOs also have substantial barriers to establishing dominance in an area and their current quality metrics are not well matched to service needs of frail elders, so both of these would need work to overcome. ACOs also often have limited expertise in geriatric care, and would need coaching to build strong interdisciplinary teams quickly.

MCOs likewise could sponsor a MediCaring Community, in much the same way as ACOs. An MCO would collect per member per month premiums, and savings would be the profits in hand. The challenges in developing clinical expertise, care plans, connections with LTSS providers, and an independent board would be fairly similar to the ACO issues outlined above. MCOs also face the challenge of today’s “star rating” system for quality. Excellent frail elder care effectively means not complying with many standard quality metrics, including tight control of diabetes, hypertension, and screenings for cancer. Also, MCOs are now required to offer the same package to all beneficiaries, so an MCO could not offer a MediCaring Community package in one area and not in others without a federal waiver.
There are several potential paths forward, but much work will be needed to get there. However, there are steps you can take today to get America moving in the right direction. You can push your Congressional representatives and state officials to allow MediCaring Communities to proceed, and encourage consumer and professional organizations to get involved. Lastly, spread the word about the MediCaring Communities book — Read it, and write a review on Amazon! We also welcome your thoughts and feedback. Write us at [email protected] with suggestions for improvement.

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Jun 202016
 

MediCaring Communities: Getting What We Want and Need in Frail Old Age at an Affordable Cost
Published June, 2016
194 pages, 6″ x 9″ (15.24 x 22.86 cm)

ISBN-10: 1481266918

List Price $9.95 at Amazon.com

Americans want a long life and most of us will get to live into our 80’s and beyond, but we have not squarely faced the challenges of living well in the last years of long lives. This book lays out a thoroughly pragmatic way to organize service delivery and financing so that Americans could count on living comfortably and meaningfully through the period of disability and illness that most will experience in the last years of life – all at a cost that families and taxpayers can sustain. MediCaring Communities offers to customize care around the priorities of elders and their families and to manage the local care system so it is reliable and efficient.

MediCaring Communities book cover

MediCaring Communities book (click cover to view on Amazon.com)

Three out of four of us will need long-term care. The period of needing someone’s help every day now lasts more than two years, on average. Most of us will not have saved enough to get through this part of life without financial help from family or government – indeed, we’ll spend almost half of our total lifetime healthcare expenditures in this last part of life, mostly on personal care that is not covered by Medicare. We have not yet required housing to be modified for living with disabilities or secured a ready supply of home-delivered food, and we certainly have not required medical care to focus on the patient and family priorities in order to enable the last years to be meaningful and comfortable. Family caregiving will be a crisis as families become smaller, more dispersed, older, and facing inadequate retirement income for the younger generation.

MediCaring Communities improve care by building care plans around the health needs and living situation of the elderly person and family, and especially from respecting their choices about priorities. The improvements in service delivery arise from integrating supportive services at home with customized medical care and installing local monitoring and management. The improvements in finance arise from harvesting savings from the current overuse of medical tests and treatments in this part of life. These come together in MediCaring Communities.

Strong evidence supports each component, but the real strength is in the combination, where savings support critical community-based services, communities build the necessary environment, and elders and their families craft their course with the help of interdisciplinary teams. This book lays it out, using expansion of PACE (The Program of All-Inclusive Care of the Elderly) as the test case. The book provides a strong and complete guide to serious reform, and just in time for the aging of the Boomers which will escalate the needs dramatically during the 2030’s. Now is the time to act.

You can read extracts online.

Advance Praise for MediCaring Communities

“For decades, Joanne Lynn’s has been the clearest, strongest, most soulful voice in America for modernizing the ways in which we care for frail elders. This essential book is her masterpiece. It offers a magisterial, evidence-based vision of that new care, and an entirely plausible pathway for reaching it. Facing a tsunami of aging, our nation simply cannot afford to ignore this counsel.”
—Donald M. Berwick, MD, President Emeritus and Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and former Administrator, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

“MediCaring Communities integrates good geriatrics and long-term services and supports, and building upon an expanded PACE program can be a tangible start. We should try this!”
—Jennie Chin Hansen, Lead in Developing PACE; Past President, AARP; and Past CEO of On Lok Senior Health Services and the American Geriatrics Society.

About Joanne Lynn

Joanne Lynn, MD, MA (Philosophy and Social Policy), MS (Quantitative Clinical Sciences), is Director of Altarum Institute’s Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness. Dr. Lynn has served thousands of persons in their last years of life in home care, office practice, hospice care, and nursing homes. She was one of the first hospice physicians in the United States. Dr. Lynn has been a tenured professor at Dartmouth and George Washington University, a quality measurement expert on the staff at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Bureau Chief for Cancer and Chronic Disease in the public health office for Washington (DC), a senior researcher at RAND, and on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s quality improvement faculty. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Master of the American College of Physicians, a Fellow of the Hastings Institute and the American Geriatrics Society, and an author of more than 280 peer-reviewed publications, 80 books and chapters, and a dozen amicus briefs and publications for public commissions.

The reader can learn more about our work and give us advice and insights at MediCaring.org.

About Altarum Institute

Altarum Institute (Altarum.org) is a nonprofit research and consulting organization based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Altarum integrates independent research and client-centered consulting to create comprehensive, systems-based solutions that improve health. One focus has been addressing the challenges of living with advanced illnesses and disabilities in old age through the Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness. The dozen staff at the Center aim to help the United States achieve social arrangements that ensure that, when we must live with serious chronic illnesses associated with advancing age, we can count on living meaningfully and comfortably, at a sustainable cost to our families and society.

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May 312016
 

By Joanne Lynn

Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) beneficiaries with advanced illnesses and worsening disabilities, and the clinicians who focus on serving them, could wind up becoming big losers if MACRA (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015) is implemented without sufficient attention to the realities of caring for these vulnerable populations. But there are ways in which we just might thread the needle and come out with sustainable excellence. Our future will depend a great deal on sustained activism by consumer advocates, clinicians, and caregivers, along with a heavy dose of thoughtful model-building.

MACRA is the payment scheme that replaces Congress’ annual drama of delaying implementation of the “Sustainable Growth Rate” payment system, which would have adjusted FFS reimbursements for physicians downward each year since 2002. MACRA directly affects only Medicare Part B payments. These are mostly payments to physicians but will also affect other provider reimbursements as well. The statute is complicated, and the proposed regulations run almost 1000 pages, but the potential impact upon the care of frail and disabled elderly people and their clinicians is easy to trace.

Physicians (and most others who are paid under Part B, such as nurse practitioners,) will automatically be in the “MIPS” (Merit-based Incentive Payment System) of MACRA. That looks to be very challenging for clinicians who focus on serving very sick and disabled elders. Each physician’s payment will be adjusted by a score that depends upon four factors: quality, cost, information technology (IT) use, and improvement activities. Quality measures Medicare now uses are mostly irrelevant to this population (e.g., cholesterol and lipid management and cancer screening) and some are even harmful (e.g., conventional diabetes and hypertension control). A few calamities give rise to relevant quality measures, such as onset of pressure ulcers or falls with injury, but these are rare events, even in high-risk populations, and most physicians won’t have many. Furthermore, our eldercare patients are costly, often in ways that are not captured in risk adjustment, such as having inadequate family caregivers or displaying very difficult behavioral problems. And nursing homes, assisted living centers, hospice programs, and home care have never received the federal funding and technical assistance needed to launch and integrate information technology, so performing well on IT use is going to be difficult.

Therefore, practitioners focused on frail and sick elderly people are sure to lose in MIPS, which has to stay revenue neutral: the model is designed such that every physician who “wins” in MIPS has to have a counterbalancing physician who “loses.” How badly geriatricians will lose will depend upon who they are compared with, but there’s no comparison group in which we can “win.” Since it is already very difficult to justify working in geriatrics, where clinician incomes are lower than other primary care, this will be a severe blow. We should rally to improve the metrics in MIPS, but that will take time and might never work adequately.

But there is another part of MACRA, called APMs, for Advanced Payment Models. Being qualified to be paid under an APM will earn the clinician a 5% bonus, without the downside risk of MIPS, as described above, and with a much better update in the fee schedule over time. The requirements for APMs are not settled yet, but some form of patient-centered medical home and accountable care organizations will count (as required by statute). Medicare’s new Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) will qualify. Basically, an APM has to aim to improve care and reduce costs, and to have the clinical service provider take on more than nominal risk. Clinical specialty societies of every stripe are jumping on board with working parties around particular procedures or diagnostic categories—creating dozens of potential APMs.

However, our elders with frailty, disability, or advanced illness can’t effectively be carved up into procedures and single diagnoses. When we are old and sick, we need comprehensive care planning, reliability across time and settings, attention to the burdens on family and the costs, comfort, respect, and meaningfulness, and, finally, life closure. These are fundamentally not episodic or time-limited, nor restricted to one domain of specialization. Arranging home-delivered food may be more important than managing diabetes. Indeed, what matters is radically up to the elder and family—no one set of conventional quality measures could address the variety of situations, preferences, and possibilities. The quality measures that will matter most will include alignment with the elder’s goals, and ongoing evaluation of the performance of care plans. Of course, understanding that alignment requires having come to know the patient and family situation, values, preferences, and goals—a knowledge set that is remarkably absent from most modern medicine and virtually all health records.

So, the APM that geriatrics needs will look very different from those of most other “specialties,” precisely because it will be comprehensive, enduring, and allegiant to the elder’s priorities. I am not sure what will work. Ideally, a geriatrics APM might include showing that the clinical provider stays with patients across time and settings; provides 24/7 on-call responsiveness with a comprehensive care plan in hand; engages with one or more community boards that have authority to monitor the elderly population’s well-being and to have a hand in managing the local eldercare delivery system; and has a high rate of patient/caregiver reports of good care planning. Such a provider might still bill the conventional FFS, but perhaps the chronic care management fee would be a more substantial part of the payment package, and the patient would be protected from co-payment (as it is in CPC+).

Although the details of MACRA and proposing an APM are daunting, the advocates for the frail and disabled elders need to work together to make their voices heard and propose one or more APMs. At a meeting of the recent technical advisory committee (the PTAC) that will advise Medicare as to the acceptability of proposed APMs, person after person representing specialty societies and major health care funders made their interests known while I was the only representative of geriatric clinicians and families. Medicare pays most of the bills for elders in decline, and Medicaid pays another large proportion. Families pay most of the rest. More than any other patient group, this group is the heart of Medicare. Yet, this phase of life is at risk of being left out of the planning altogether, for lack of strategic advocacy.

Of course, our clinicians have overwhelming responsibilities and low incomes, and our professional societies are much less well-financed than most other specialties. We have not been able, in general, to support centers that can handle registries, claims analysis, and policy modeling. Furthermore, our patient advocates are likewise limited, with the larger ones focused upon earlier, healthier, stages of aging, though we have important but small, focused advocacy organizations around particularly troubling issues like nursing home abuses and legal rights under federal programs. While cancer and heart disease have strong research, consumer, and clinician organizations, geriatrics and palliative care populations and those who serve these populations have few such resources.

What is the better course? First, all who care about their futures as elderly persons, or as caregivers, or as clinicians and service providers should quickly plan and strategize, and we should all get behind one or more comprehensive models. A worthwhile model needs to be more comprehensive than the research-supported models like home-based primary care, or GRACE, or INTERACT. It also needs to be sustainable from the start. MACRA’s PTAC has proposed a process that would enable them to devote some funds to developing models. We should advocate that this support go especially to the otherwise disadvantaged field of eldercare. We could build a collaborative effort by a wide variety of provider and consumer groups. None of these groups has the funding, the skills, and the will to put together a winning APM on its own, and half-formed competing models would reduce our effectiveness. Together, we could aggregate resources and get behind a useful model or a few—and win!

Rather than having only MIPS, which is likely to disadvantage geriatrics and palliative care, or APMs established to advantage fragmentation, we could end up with a good payment model that supports elders, their families, and their service providers. It still might be true that this phase of life should generally be paid in a capitated or salaried system. However, for now, most Medicare patients are still in FFS arrangements. Clinicians who are willing and able to serve this difficult population must be able to make a living providing the right services. Otherwise, care for elders living with frailty, disability, and advanced illnesses will fare badly, and all of us will suffer when it comes our turn.

For more information:
Administration takes first step to implement legislation modernizing how Medicare pays physicians for quality (HHS)

MACRA Quality Payment Program (CMS)

To push this agenda, write to [email protected] and talk with your consumer and professional groups about participating in formulating a plan, and then getting behind it.

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Apr 082016
 

By Joanne Lynn

The time has come to seek cooperation from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) so MediCaring Communities can get underway in many parts of the country. These programs are as necessary to an aging society as pediatrics and obstetrics are for children and maternal care. Empowering communities to take care of their own residents who aim to age in place and eventually live with frailty is a challenge we can meet without impoverishing younger people or stalling the economy. But it will take some action now. Can you and your community be among the pioneers?

The core ideas are simple and well-proven. Now is the time to pull them together into a workable and affordable system of care. First, we have to be willing to acknowledge that becoming old and frail—having two or more limitations in Activities of Daily Living, presence of cognitive impairment, or being older than 85—is now an expectable part of life for most Americans. When this period arrives, we usually need a more supportive and adaptable care system. The arrangements we have now for health care and supportive services are frustrating, wasteful, and a serious misfit for providing the comfort, meaningfulness, personalization, and reliability that are so greatly desired at that point in our lives. Critically important, we become more and more individual as we grow old: each of us has a unique set of relationships, values, resources, aspirations and fears, as well as a particular medical situation. This demands that frail elderly people have a thoughtful care plan for the services needed across time—one that fits their individual preferences and priorities.

Medical care for frail elderly Medicare beneficiaries also needs to fit their situation. Screening to prevent illnesses that are unlikely to become a serious problem for a decade or more is a good example of low-value care that should be avoided, while preventing falls and delirium assumes a very high priority. Going to the hospital may sometimes be essential; however, for frail elders, this entails much more risk (e.g., infections and falls) than it did earlier in life, so hospitalization decisions need to be carefully considered. More medical services should be provided in the person’s home once it becomes very difficult and disorienting to go to a doctor’s office or clinic.

Here’s another key point: For the mainly homebound frail elderly Medicare population, supportive services are critically important to daily well-being and must be readily available and reliable. Some frail elders need food delivered or housing adaptations. Others need ongoing personal care or supervision. The great majority hopes to stay in their homes and not have to move to institutions, and most want to keep up relationships with neighbors, family, religious groups, and others. Family caregivers of the future will be both less available and will face more substantial challenges than in the past, and we need to support them.

Scores of improved practices are known to achieve better care, but to date all have been small projects, hard to sustain and difficult to scale up and spread. The current funding rules in the United States encourage overuse of medical care while providing scant supportive services and almost no tools for communities to evaluate local needs and priorities. It is bizarre that any physician can write a prescription for a drug costing $100,000 that has been found to be only a little helpful for only a few potential patients, but neither the doctor nor anyone else can order up a substitute caregiver when the spouse is ill or find a way to get food delivered when there is a long waiting list for Meals on Wheels. Most families and elderly people find this strange as well, once they experience the situation. But most people are only gradually realizing that this sort of distortion is a direct result of policy choices—and that we could choose differently.

MediCaring Communities is a way to choose differently. Here’s how: Each community would develop a way to reflect the voice for its frail elders, which we’ll call a “Community Board,” though it could have a number of names and organizational features. The important thing is that it would help guide providers in the local system toward achieving and maintaining high-value care. For example, the Community Board would work with health care, public health, and social services providers to monitor performance metrics that reflect the priorities of frail elders in the area, including the preferences of individuals, and help decide on priorities for investments and improvements.

Where would funding for investment and system management come from? The funding would come from savings arising from much-improved coordinated services that are adapted appropriately for the population of frail elderly Medicare beneficiaries, follow their preferences, and adhere to the principles of geriatrics, and that reduce overutilized, low-value services in Medicare! The potential for savings varies, but an average of about 30% is plausible for almost any MediCaring Community program. Even saving 10% would enhance the ability of communities to make supportive services that are needed by elders—and which are the mainstay of long-term care—much more available. A program could be built on a managed care platform, an Accountable Care Organization arrangement, or a Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) program.

Recent legislation has made a new avenue possible through the PACE program, the most established, community-based service delivery model for older adults. The PACE Innovation Act (P.L. 114-85), signed into law on November 5 2015, provides the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) with the authority to loosen the rigidity of the PACE program. CMS’ Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) can now pilot expanded PACE models to serve a broader population. For the first time, the program can be readily adapted to serve Medicare-only beneficiaries who have a need for some LTSS but are not yet functionally at their states’ nursing home level of care and have incomes above their state’s Medicaid financial eligibility threshold. Building MediCaring Communities on an ACO, MA plan, or PACE platform will require some cooperation with CMS.

That’s where your help is needed. The time has come to ask CMS to take up the challenge of working with willing applicants, starting by opening the door to allow pioneer MediCaring Community programs, including willing PACE programs, to move ahead.
Here’s what we have found likely to be important in the first set of communities, enabling them to lead in building reliable, sustainable services for frail elders in the MediCaring Communities model:

  • A history of cooperation in the public interest;
  • Implementation of some improvements already in frail elder care, such as some experience with models like PACE, GRACE, INTERACT, local support of nutrition and transportation services, age-friendly environments, or similar models and programs;
  • Leaders who are concerned about the future effects of increases in the numbers of persons needing daily help in old age;
  • Enough frail elders to field a convincing project but still small enough to be able to make improvements quickly (perhaps 500–10,000 is a reasonable range, and frail elders are about one-tenth of all persons older than 65);
  • Reasonably self-contained area, with boundaries that are well-known, that is, the health care and supportive services to people who live in the area are generally provided by services anchored in the area.

There will be other considerations, but none are as important as commitment and leadership. We invite you to think on it and talk it over with others, and if building the elder care system of the future is plausible and appealing in your community, city, or county, please let us know! We are planning some webinars and perhaps some meetings to spell out details, answer questions, and shape up our request before we head to CMS to get approval for leadership communities to get underway.

Serving a far larger population of elders is a solvable problem—it is only made difficult by protocols and regulations that were developed for a different (younger) demographic reality. Let’s modernize our care system for our old age and create a trustworthy set of arrangements that generate pride instead of waste and frustration. Send us an email today.

What do you think? Can you help to make this happen? Write to us at [email protected] if you can see a good opportunity in a community that you know. Also encourage support from the leadership of professional and advocacy organizations, political leaders, and CMS. Let us know if you are doing this and what progress you are making. If you contact us, we’ll be in touch and will aim to include your community in the list of potential pioneer communities to help persuade CMS to let us proceed.

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