Three days before leaving their respective offices in the current Health and Human Services administration, Andy Slavitt and Vindell Washington touted the improvements made during their tenures and gave parting advice to the newcomers in a blog released Tuesday.
Slavitt, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services acting administrator, and Washington, the national coordinator for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, will leave their posts the day President-elect is sworn into office, Friday, Jan. 20.
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What's essential if the move to value-based care is to continue, is an exchange of information between providers and insurers, they said.
"Data is the lifeblood of the value-based payment environment," they said.
Challenges include accessing data across disparate payers. The average physician practice contracts with 12 different insurers. There's also the increased administrative complexity for participating in alternative payment model programs tied to different payers.
The officials pushed streamlined quality reporting, in which clinicians collect data and share it at the push of a button with any authorized party, they said.
"HHS envisions a future where clinicians in a multi-payer environment obtain actionable, reliable, and comprehensive feedback data regardless of who pays for their patients' care," they said.
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HHS is continuing to work towards minimizing the financial and administrative burden of collecting and reporting information on clinicians and practices, especially small practices and those in rural and underserved areas, they said.
In their roadmap to the future, Slavitt and Washington outlined obstacles, such as efforts by some vendors to put up barriers to sharing data.
They made six recommendations, including having a seamless interaction between point of care solutions and other entities, through the use of a standard application programming interface.
Health IT developers can play a key role in this vision by making it easier for clinicians to share data between their electronic health records and other applications or services, such as registries.
Third-party entities can perform core functions such as facilitating quality reporting to all payers, combining data from disparate sources of care in a medical neighborhood and presenting it in a usable way. This will help clinicians to understand data on their patients, at a reasonable cost, they said.
For instance, vendor partners working with select regions participating in the Comprehensive Primary Care initiative provide aggregate feedback reports including data from both Medicare and commercial payers.
Stakeholders could realize significant efficiencies by coming together around shared governance and financing, such as what is being done by participants in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation State Innovations Model.
Stakeholders need one place to go for data, they said. This means greater data transparency and consolidation in efforts such as state all payer claims databases and Medicare qualified entities.
Key patient data needs to be standardized for quality measurement. Libraries of data elements allow new electronic measures to be easily captured, calculated and reported for use by clinicians and consumers, the blog said.
There also needs to be alignment around how quality is measured and reported across payers.
Improvements have occurred through the 21st Century Cures Act, which advances interoperability, the electronic health record, and quality payment programs under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, MACRA, that consolidated former programs.
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"It's been a great honor working with the healthcare community and serving the American public. Working together across the healthcare landscape, the nation can move towards a truly 21st century data infrastructure that frees clinicians to confidently transition to value-based payment and realize better care, smarter spending, and healthier people," Slavitt and Washington said.
Twitter: @SusanJMorse