UMass Medical School health policy expert Katharine London, MS, will join a roster of health care leaders at the latest Brookings Institution MEDTalk on Wednesday, Sept. 24, to discuss how alternative payment models can support innovative ways of providing care for children with asthma.
“Alternative payment models give primary care practices the flexibility to target funds for preventative care and care coordination that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do,” said London, a principal at the Center for Health Law and Economics, a unit within the Commonwealth Medicine health care consulting division.
MEDTalk: Pediatric Asthma and Transforming Care for the Most Vulnerable, the third in the Merkin Series on Innovations in Care Delivery, will feature seven TED-style talks in person at the Brookings Intuition’s Washington, D.C., headquarters or as a live webcast. The Brookings Institution is a private, nonprofit devoted to independent research and innovative policy solutions.
London will focus her talk on three themes: alternative payment methods currently in use in Massachusetts; how providers who care for patients with asthma and chronic conditions can benefit from them; and possible difficulties in execution of the reforms.
“Alternative payment methods allow providers to maintain the same level of revenue even if they are offering a different style of care with fewer traditional services,” London said.
One innovative model London will discuss is the Children’s High-Risk Asthma Bundled Payment Demonstration Program, a partnership between MassHealth and UMass Medical School. The program aims to evaluate whether a bundled payment—which pays providers one fee for multiple services—can both improve health outcomes of children with high-risk asthma who are enrolled in MassHealth and reduce their need for costly emergency room visits and hospitalizations.
Under the bundled payment system in the demonstration program, of which London is the UMMS project lead, providers would have the flexibility to offer non-traditional interventions and services. Pediatric patients with high-risk asthma could receive vacuum filters, mattress covers or home visits from community health workers who teach families ways of reducing household triggers.
The challenge in implementing alternative payment models for Medicaid programs is targeting preventive services to members who are most likely to need them and developing a prospective budget for these services.
