The Arkansas Patient-Centered Medical Home Program is a key component of the Arkansas Health Care Payment Improvement Initiative (APII) and is transforming the structure of the state's health care system to control unsustainable growth in costs and reward providers who consistently deliver high-quality, coordinated, cost-effective care to patients. PCMH rewards team-based care and promotes early intervention to reduce complications and associated health care costs. The Arkansas PCMH program builds on the CPC initiative sponsored by CMS, with three successive waves of provider adoption over the course of the coming 2 years.
The payers in this initiative support primary care transformation through a two-part payment structure:
Care coordination:
The care coordination payment is risk adjusted (e.g., ranging from $1 to $30 per attributed beneficiary per month) based on factors including demographics (age, sex), diagnoses and utilization. After each quarter, DMS may pay, recover, or offset the care coordination payments to ensure that a practice did not receive a care coordination payment for any beneficiary who died or lost eligibility if the practice lost eligibility during the quarter.
In order to receive these monthly PMPMs, practices must demonstrate that they have implemented and are performing numerous activities integral to building a medical home structure. These activities include providing 24/7 live voice access to a health professional, identification of and formulation of care plans for high-risk patients, flexible same-day scheduling, installment of meaningful use certified electronic health records, assessment of operations and opportunities for improvement, and other practice enhancements related to a PCMH framework. - AJMC, June 2015
Shared savings:
Arkansas Department of Human Services (October 2015)