Medicare Medical Home Demo Update. What's Coming Next?

CMS has posted an update pdf at its Medicare Medical Home Demonstration web site. It's short, readable and has given the Disease Management Care Blog some additional insights about its plans. For example, CMS has no intention of helping its participating physicians with interm updates on how things are going. There is also going to be reliance on physician professional organizations, academies and societies to aid with recruitment of physician practices. To participate, docs will need to enter at least 150 patients into the Demo.

Recall also that CMS' care management fee will depend on the intensity or depth of the medical home services being provided by the physicians' practices: more depth, more payment. In its post, CMS explains that it decided to use its own two-payment tier methodology instead of the NCQA's three tier approach because its lowest ‘introductory’ tier didn’t represent enough of a practice change. This makes sense to the DMCB, since it is the style of the NCQA to open new recognition programs with low thresholds that grow more vigorous with time. CMS, in the meantime, doesn't have this luxury. This makes the DMCB wonder: if the Demo is sucessful and is expanded, will physicians have to deal with two medical home recognition standards?

The eight regions haven't been selected yet. What will the consultants, electronic record vendors, practice management groups and disease management organizations do?

The DMCB suspects that they will buy several of these......

..........fill them with these

Outfit them with this...........

...................and push them out the door!