AHIP, the American Medical Association and the National Association of ACOs have released a playbook of voluntary best practices for value-based care payment arrangements.
National Association of ACOs President and CEO Clif Gaus said that in the past decade, value-based care has grown from "almost nothing to an undeniably significant aspect of our health system," according to a joint April 10 news release from the organizations.
"This iteration of the playbook synthesizes what we've learned over the last decade plus, so that payers, physicians, hospitals and ACOs can implement payment and delivery models that improve outcomes and lower costs," Dr. Gaus said.
The report said several key themes emerged during working sessions for the playbooks. One is the importance of collaboration and flexibility in developing value-based care payment arrangements. Another was transparency. The "sheer complexity" of the payment arrangements, and at times, the unpredictability of payment can be addressed with clear advance documentation and regular feedback around methodologies and performance, the report said.
The voluntary best practices are broken into seven domains:
- Patient attribution
- Benchmarking
- Risk adjustment
- Quality performance impact on payment
- Levels of financial risk
- Payment timing and accuracy
- Incentivizing for value-based care practice participant performance
Read the playbook here.