The first reporting period for Medicare’s Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement Model found that participating providers cut costs for episodes of care by more than $900, or 3.3 percent.

Most of the savings, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reports, were achieved by sending patients to less-expensive post-acute-care settings or by reducing patients’ length of stay in such facilities.

CMS also found that the program’s mandatory participants, located in 67 metropolitan statistical areas, achieved these savings without compromising quality of care as measured by post-discharge emergency room visits, hospital readmissions, and deaths.

Learn more about CJR’s early results in this report in Becker’s Hospital Review or go here to see the report CMS commissioned on the program’s first nine months in operation.