The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced its plans to change the way that Americans receive and pay for primary healthcare.
According to a statement released by CMS, they aim to target the flexibility of how doctors can administer care to their patients and develop pay incentives for achieving best outcomes and higher standards in care for patients.
Medical officials including Dr. Patrick Conway, CMS deputy administrator and chief medical officer believe this will be a smart move in better developing the country’s health care system and aims to achieve optimum health care opportunities and health care spending.
“Strengthening primary care is critical to an effective health care system. By supporting primary care doctors and clinicians to spend time with patients, serve patients’ needs outside of the office visit and better coordinate care with specialists we can continue to build a health care system that results in healthier people and smarter spending of our health care dollars. The Comprehensive Primary Care Plus model represents the future of health care that we’re striving towards.”
However, there are some skeptics that aren’t convinced that this new model will work as it will only be voluntary and only 20,000 practicing primary-care doctors are expected to sign up for the scheme. This also follows over 60 similar schemes that CMS have planned for or trialled according to an editorial in Bloomberg View.
Although some aren’t sure whether this plan will be a success, there are many who believe this to be a much needed gamble considering the state of the current ‘wasteful and inefficient fee-for-service payment system’ and think that pay-incentives for doctors could be the right way to achieve this as written in an editorial for Modern Healthcare.
Whether or not this will promote high-quality and high-value care is yet to be seen and the government’s gradual process of implementing the new incentive will possibly convince more doctor’s to sign up.