New CMS initiative a pivotal point in primary care market

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently announced a bold move to accelerate the Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) program, news that I have been waiting on for a long time.

To provide a bit of background, CPC is a practice and payment model that rewards primary care physicians -- through an additional fixed monthly payment -- for taking care of patients in a proactive way instead of waiting for patients to show up at their clinics or hospitals. CMS initially rolled out CPC as a limited experiment through its innovation center.

This new initiative (now called CPC-Plus) will expand CPC to 20,000 primary care doctors treating up to 25 million patients on an annual basis. According to the CMS announcement, each participating practice will receive $20 per patient per month in care management fees to do whatever it can to improve patients' health. Additional bonuses can be handed out at year-end through shared cost savings from CMS. The initiative will kick off in January 2017, and care practice recruiting and contracting will start this summer.