Six Fortune 500 companies and Massachusetts have launched Catalyst for Payment Reform, a non-profit organization focused on helping large employers use their leverage to accelerate healthcare payment reforms.
CPR's executive director will be Suzanne Delbanco, PhD, the founder and former CEO of The Leapfrog Group, an organization that seeks to leverage the group purchasing power of employers to influence healthcare safety, quality and consumer value. She brings a track record of working with large healthcare purchasers to create change in the healthcare marketplace.
"Now that we have laid the foundation for payment reform by agreeing on standard ways to measure healthcare performance, and by increasingly reporting information on performance publicly, we can begin to align incentives for better healthcare on a larger scale," she said in a statement announcing the group's launch. "I am thrilled to be working with leading employers who have a strong history of innovation in these areas."
The group consists of the Boeing Company, Delta Air Lines, Equity Healthcare, GE, the Group Insurance Commission of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Intel Corporation and Wal-Mart Stores. Each has agreed to advocate for healthcare payment approaches that reduce costs and waste while spurring higher quality and to work to put such payments in place with the health insurance plans with which they contract.
"The private sector needs to lead innovation and influence payment policies to ensure that public and private sector payment improves value for all. With the participation of these seven large employers and Suzanne's direction, CPR is now poised to lead the way," said Anna Fallieras, a program leader for national healthcare initiatives for GE and a member of the CPR board.
The employers will use sourcing and contracting tools to create a road map for changing the way employers pay for healthcare. CPR will provide tools to assess the attributes of specific markets to determine how various reforms to payment can be most effective in those areas, and will track the nation's progress on payment reform.
CPR will release a number of tools, including a market assessment tool and six action briefs that outline steps employers can take toward three types of payment reform (fee for service, bundled payments and global payments) and two types of delivery system reform (accountable care organizations and medical homes), as well as analyses of how the level of competition in a given market affects the rates at which purchasers and plans pay providers.