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The Obama administration recently announced that it plans to expand bundled
payment models in the Medicare program. Bundled payments are one of several
new payment alternatives in Medicare and Medicaid designed to hold health
providers accountable for the cost and quality of care, and thereby encourage and
reward better health care value.
All these socalled valuebased payment initiatives, which include accountable care
organizations (ACOs) and enhancements to older managed care programs under
Medicare and Medicaid, are to some degree experimental and their full effects are
The Promise and Pitfalls of
Bundled Payments
September 7, 2016 | David Blumenthal, M.D. and David Squires
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still uncertain. However, the spread of bundled payments deserves particular
scrutiny because of potential unintended consequences.
Why Bundled Payments?
Under bundled payments, a single payment is made for all of the services
associated with an episode of care, such as a hip or knee replacement or cardiac
surgery. Services might include all inpatient, outpatient, and rehabilitation care
associated with the procedure.
“Knee and hip replacements are well-suited to bundles because they often involve comparatively
young patients who are physically active (often the source of their joint damage) and want to remain
so. But when patients have multiple chronic conditions that interact with each other, it becomes less
clear whether the bundle should include the costs of caring for all those problems.”
There are a number of potential advantages to this payment approach. Bundled
payments give providers strong incentives to keep their costs down, including by
preventing avoidable complications. Bundled payments also can encourage
collaboration across diverse providers and institutions, as well as the development
and implementation of care pathways that follow evidencebased guidelines. In
addition, bundles target the work of specialists, who have been less likely up to
now than primary care physicians to participate in valuebased payment
arrangements.
More conceptually, health care economists are drawn to bundled payments because
a bundle of care constitutes a clinically and intuitively meaningful “product” — in
this case, the clinical episode. Defining clear products in health care helps create
markets in which providers directly compete on quality and price. One barrier to
effective health care markets has been that prices, when available, tend to relate to
inputs into clinical care — such as pills, bandages, bed days, or Xrays — that are
not meaningful to consumers of care and that don’t necessarily predict the total
costs of care. For example, a health system that charges a lot for Xrays may still
be more efficient because it uses fewer of them or saves money on other inputs.
Bundles bring all these inputs together into a single price for a single basket of
services.
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2014/07/02/the-payment-reform-landscape-bundled-payment/
https://hbr.org/2016/07/how-to-pay-for-health-care
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What Are the Potential Problems?
Yet bundled payments have drawbacks. First, it can be complicated to define and
track the type of care that should be included in the bundled payments for which a
given provider is at risk. Knee and hip replacements are wellsuited to bundles
because they often involve comparatively young patients who are physically active
(often the source of their joint damage) and want to remain so. But when patients
have multiple chronic conditions that interact with each other, it becomes less clear
whether the bundle should include the costs of caring for all those problems. When
a hip patient has asthma and diabetes, for example, there may be a tendency for
orthopedists to try to shift costs from a hip bundle to another specialist’s asthma or
diabetes bundle. Monitoring the fairness of these interactions could become
burdensome and increase administrative costs.
Second, as the hip patient example suggests, bundles could inhibit certain types of
care coordination, even as it encourages other types. On the plus side, bundles may
encourage hospitals to work more closely with rehab centers. On the negative side,
bundles may encourage specialists’ already strong tendency to see patients not as
whole individuals, but as single disease problems or procedures, and to diminish
their sense of responsibility for costs of illnesses not included in their particular
bundled payment.
Third, bundled payments could encourage destructive competition for patients with
profitable bundles. The otherwise healthy patient needing a knee replacement may
prove more profitable than a knee replacement patient with complicating problems
such as heart, lung, or kidney disease. While risk adjustment could somewhat
compensate for cherrypicking, such adjustments have not proven foolproof in the
past, and an entirely new fleet of risk adjusters that are specific to given clinical
episodes will likely be required. Monitoring the work of multiple risk adjusters and
possible gaming by providers could become yet one more administrative expense.
Finally, bundled payments may make it harder for populationbased payment
methods like ACOs to be successful. Providers who participate in ACOs assume
responsibility for all the care their patients need during a given period of time,
including specialty care. This general accountability for their patients’ health
encourages efforts to coordinate care, especially for complex patients. Still, to be
financially viable, ACOs must generate savings from existing services. If
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independent specialty providers capture the elective procedures for which savings
are easiest to generate through bundled payments, it could be harder for ACOs to
find those savings within their own service mix.
Proceed with Caution
So how to move forward? At a minimum, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services should make sure that the current bundled payment experiments don’t
undermine ACOs and other populationbased models. This will mean taking a close
look at the rules governing who is responsible when a patient is attributed to both
an ACO and a bundled payment.
The ideal solution may be to encourage and support the use of bundles within
ACOs and other riskbearing organizations that assume broad responsibility for
their patients’ health. One of the most wellknown examples of bundled payments
— ProvenCare, which was originally marketed as a “warranty” on coronary artery
bypass graft surgery — was developed and implemented within the integrated
Geisinger Health System. If ACOs increase the number of provider organizations
with financial incentives like Geisinger’s, bundled payments may spread rapidly on
their own — and without many of the current drawbacks.
Publication Details
Publication Date: September 7, 2016
Author: David Blumenthal, M.D., David Squires
Contact: David Squires, Former Senior Researcher to the President, The
Commonwealth Fund
Citation:
D. Blumenthal and D. Squires, “The Promise and Pitfalls of Bundled Payments,” To
the Point, The Commonwealth Fund, Sept. 7, 2016.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp078124
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