More than 500 healthcare practices have been selected to participate in a new pilot program designed to prevent heart attacks and strokes in Medicare patients, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced Thursday.
The Million Hearts Cardiovascular Disease Risk Reduction Model is the latest idea from the CMS Innovation Center, which conceptualizes and tests strategies to move the industry from a fee-for-service model to one that pays based on health outcomes. Under the pilot system, doctors would use predictive modeling to identify patients at risk of developing cardiovascular disease, using health data to assign individual risk scores and design intervention plans.
The five-year pilot is expected to eventually involve approximately 20,000 healthcare providers and 3.3 million Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries. All types of doctors will participate in the program, including general practice, internal medicine and geriatric physicians.
The effort is part of the Million Hearts campaign, which was launched by CMS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2012 to prevent one million heart attacks and strokes by 2017.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, according to the CDC. The agency estimates that heart attacks and stroke cost the industry $300 billion a year, accounting for one in three deaths.
Earlier this month, CMS proposed to incorporate a similar Innovation Center initiative, the Diabetes Prevention Program, into Medicare for 2018. That proposal was greeted with applause by doctors groups that are frequently at odds with insurers and the administration over the push for more value-based care.
In March, CMS revealed that it had successfully tied 30 percent of all Medicare payments to value-based delivery systems, affecting roughly 10 million patients. The agency originally intended to reach that goal by the end of the year.
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Photo courtesy of: TheHill.com
Originally Published On: TheHill.com
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