Early returns from the Health Care Innovation Awards – a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services initiative that tests new payment and service delivery models – have shown "a wide range of experiences that have resulted in tangible benefits for patients" and have already helped the agency develop better policies, said CMS Chief Medical Officer Patrick Conway, MD.

In 2012, the CMS Innovation Center awarded more than 100 cooperative agreements through the awards, promising as much as $1 billion to organizations whose innovation projects could offer novel ways improve care and lower costs for Medicare, Medicaid, and/or Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollees.

Entrants were assessed according to areas such as behavioral health and substance abuse; complex and high risk patient targeting; community resource planning and prevention; disease specific; hospital interventions; primary care redesign, and shared decision making/medication management.

The first evaluation reports were released in April 2015; after reviewing the second reports this spring, Conway said he was gratified.

"Where data are available, these reports describe preliminary impact estimates on key outcome measures such as hospitalizations and readmissions," he wrote in a blog post. "A number of awardees showed favorable results on one or more measures of cost, hospitalizations, readmissions, and emergency room visits. Here are some early highlights of a few of the awards."

[Also: HHS puts a cool $1 billion toward Innovation Awards]

For example, Conway pointed to Innovative Oncology Business Solutions, which, through its Community Oncology Medical Home, which cares for 2,100 cancer patients across seven community oncology practices nationwide, has helped establish pathways that allowed real-time symptoms management; improved access with same-day appointments and extended office hours.

Moreover, "provided disease management guidance for providers to improve treatment decision-making, symptom recognition, and assistance with patients’ self care, pain management, and caregiver support," he wrote.

Conway also spotlighted:

• The High-Risk Children’s Clinic at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. The HRCC "offered dedicated outpatient services (primary, specialty, post-acute, chronic disease management) and around-the-clock phone access for extremely fragile and complex chronically ill children enrolled in Medicaid," he said. "Every family in the HRCC has an assigned clinician who involves the parent in all health assessments, empowering parents as experts in their child’s health condition and educating families on exacerbating symptoms. The evaluation found that the program significantly reduced emergency department visits and hospital admissions, which drove savings in medical and hospital cost of care for participating children. In addition, the report finds that the patient and family centered approach appears to have resulted in improved patient and family caregiver experience.
• Welvie, meanwhile, "is a program that offers education, health information, and decision-making resources regarding preference-sensitive surgeries to Medicare beneficiaries," said Conway. "Welvie conducts regularly scheduled, population-based outreach well before treatment decisions need to be made. Program administrators also review regional health care utilization patterns and mail outreach materials to arrive before periods of increased surgery utilization so that beneficiaries can recall and access the resources when needed. The program has enrolled over 181,000 beneficiaries in Ohio and almost 54,000 beneficiaries in Texas. Enrollees in Ohio had a statistically significant decrease in mortality as well as indications of a reduction in hospital readmissions following surgery-related hospital admissions for the Medicare FFS beneficiaries. The program was also associated with reductions in various surgery-related categories of expenditures among Medicare Advantage beneficiaries."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com

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