Want Healthcare for All? Ditch Fee-for-Service, Says Former CMS Chief
“reliance on hospitals is one of the biggest mistakes in design we have — home is the hub” Don Berwick
If the U.S. wants to give everyone access to healthcare, fee-for-service medicine has to go, Donald Berwick, MD, former president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, said at a webinar on value-based care sponsored by the Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy.
When it comes to implementing value-based care, “we need to, I think, move very, very much faster than we currently are,” said Don Crane, CEO of America’s Physician Groups
CMMI director Liz Fowler, PhD, JD, said her agency will be focused for the short term on its Comprehensive Primary Care model, under which primary care practices can receive management fees and share in any savings generated by efficient, high-quality care of their Medicare patients.
Fowler emphasized the “need to move towards advanced primary care with, ideally, accountability for total cost of care, recognizing we’re on a trajectory and not everyone is ready. But if we really want to coordinate care for chronically ill and seriously ill patients … we need to get primary care right.”
