Medicare case management: Practices love it despite lack of cost savings

The use of support staff to reach out to patients between visits is helping to keep down costs as well.

“The 3% reduction in primary care visits, albeit a small contributor to total expenditures, suggests that nonbillable calls, e-mails, and interactions related to care management, supported by initiative fees, may have supplanted or reduced the need for office visits,” Ms. Dale and colleagues wrote.

The investigators pointed to a few reasons why the numbers might not be more favorable in the early years. The first is simply time. It is still early on and changes might not be fully implemented and practices might not yet have had the time to benefit from the changes to realize shared savings, they noted.

“It is also possible that primary care practices need stronger value-based incentives, accompanied by consistent incentives for other providers who care for the same patients,” the authors noted.

Further, the growth in accountable care organizations running parallel to this program “may have made it more difficult for initiative practices to generate savings or broader improvements in quality relative to comparison practices.”

The CMS has announced that the next iteration of the program, CPC+, will begin in 2017.

gtwachtman@frontlinemedcom.com