Bundled Payments Work, Study Finds, But HHS Nominee No Fan

The savings came without impacting quality. Patients at Baptist Health System were just as likely to be readmitted to the hospital or end up in the emergency room as patients nationally. There was some indication that quality of care may be better, fewer patients under bundled payments had long, extended hospital stays.

In Price’s letter from September, he said that Medicare had exceeded its powers in imposing such bundled payments, which he said took decisions out of the hands of doctors and patients.

That doesn’t seem to be the case, according to Dr. Amol Navathe, an assistant professor of medicine and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the authors of the JAMA study. Instead, Navathe and his colleagues suggest that the bundled payments actually fostered greater collaboration between surgeons, administrators and patients because programs could only succeed in saving money if physicians were engaged in creating standardized pathways for care.

For example, the Baptist Health System saved about 30 percent on implant costs, around $2,000 on each artificial joint, by using the least expensive medically equivalent implants as determined by the hospitals’ surgeons.

Usually, physicians are prevented from benefitting when hospitals save money because of anti-kickback laws. Waivers under bundled payment models mean surgeons can put in the time to find the best, most cost-effective implants, and share in some of that savings.

“It takes that extra level of effort and coordination, and proactively communicate with [patients],” Navathe said. “Preplanning, setting of expectations and communicating up-front is resource intensive, when they have the incentive to do that they were willing to expend the extra resources to make that happen.”

When bundles included care after a patient’s hospital stay, spending on rehabilitation went down 54 percent. That’s because hospitals took the time to match patients to the right level of care, Navathe said.

Patients who didn’t need to stay in a nursing home or rehab center were set up with home health care or physical therapy.

Price has objected to CMS making bundled payments mandatory, calling it an instance of federal overreach. But bundled payments only work if everyone has to participate, according to Darshak Sanghavi, the former director of prevention and population health at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.

If hospitals can choose whether or not to participate, only the ones that are already delivering care efficiently –and coming in under CMS’s cost target — will use bundles and Medicare will constantly be paying out bonuses. The system needs to be mandatory, Sanghavi said, to pull in less efficient hospitals and give them incentive to change.

“Stopping the programs for ideological reasons I think impedes innovation in a way that is going to consign us to having really, really high costs of care that’s going to continue in the future,” Sanghavi said.

Bundled payments aren’t just for hip and knee replacements. On Dec. 20, CMS announced it would expand mandatory bundled payments to treatments for heart attacks, bypass surgery and cardiac rehab beginning in July 2017. In its waning days, the Obama administration is effectively throwing down the gauntlet to the incoming administration on bundled payments, one of its signature reforms.