Last fall the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation brought together grant recipients and national experts to talk about health care payment and delivery system reform design and implementation issues.
Now, the foundation has released a brief paper that addresses what the experts consider to be the three greatest challenges in the pursuit of such reform:
- aligning alternative payments with clinician compensation
- considering social determinants of health in payment reform models
- repurposing hospital resources
The paper also takes a look at whether health care payments should be subject to risk adjustment to reflect the social and economic barriers to better health and care that some patients face. The National Association of Urban Hospitals (NAUH) has long advocated such risk adjustment in Medicare payments and has endorsed legislation to compel Medicare to introduce such a policy change, including the Establishing Beneficiary Equity in the House Readmissions Program Act of 2015, which was introduced in both the House and the Senate last month.
These issues and more are addressed in greater detail in the new paper “Three Emerging Challenges for Sustained Payment and Delivery System Reform,” which can be found here.
