The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgent need to transform our current model of healthcare financing from a system that rewards the volume of services to one that incentivizes real improvements in personal and population health. Despite some progress in recent years, the financial well-being of the healthcare system is still heavily dependent on the volume and utilization of healthcare services paid by fee-for-service payments. Shutting down elective surgeries temporarily dealt the healthcare system a deep financial blow, leading to a loss of 1.4 million healthcare jobs just in the month of April 2020 and triggering calls for additional emergency funding for hospitals. The fragility of our healthcare system has never been on such clear display, and the need for practice and payment reform has never been greater. At the same time, not all care delivery systems experienced the same financial hardships due to the decrease in patient visits because of the pandemic. How can we enhance integrated payment models that deliver whole-person health care to a community, as these models fared the best in terms of finances and patient care during the pandemic?
To inform this work, the NAM Leadership Consortium will convene a planning committee of experts, host a three-day symposium focused on accelerating movement away from fee-for-service and toward integrated payment approaches, and then author a NAM Special Publication identifying key priority action areas.
Other workshop dates and times:
