PCPCC commends federal Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative

WASHINGTON, DC, April 11, 2012 –The Primary Care Collaborative commends the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for the official launch of the Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) initiative, an effort to advance comprehensive, coordinated, patient-centered care.

“Primary care transformation is essential; it is the foundation for true health system reform,” said Marci Nielsen, Ph.D., MPH, PCPCC executive director. “This effort to align payers and providers is groundbreaking. It represents an important advancement in bringing all payers in a market together to support comprehensive, coordinated, patient-centered primary care. Health plan cooperation and collaboration is vital to achieving true transformation; and CMS clearly understands this.”

The CPC initiative, conducted under the auspices of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), is a multi-payer effort fostering collaboration among public and private health plans to strengthen primary care. It will focus on five core functions:risk-stratified care management;access and continuity;planned care for chronic conditions and preventative care;patient and caregiver engagement; andcoordination of care across the medical neighborhood. Building on the patient-centered medical home concept, CPC aligns payment reform with practice transformation; participating payers will reimburse medical practices for providing comprehensive primary care. This effort embodies many of the goals of the PCPCC, which works to provide resources to help patients, purchasers and health plans to advance the concept of the patient-centered medical home.