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Medicare needs to streamline its portfolio of alternative payment models (APMs), the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) said Tuesday in its annual report to Congress.
“CMS [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] is to be commended for the vigor with which it has approached its mandate of implementing a wide variety of APMs over the last 10 years,” MedPAC said in its report. “The strategy of implementing a plethora of models over the last decade has given the agency an opportunity to build up the evidence base about what works and what does not. While this strategy has yielded valuable information, the commission contends that continuing to test a large number of independent APMs is likely to inhibit the ability of APMs to reach their full potential. We therefore recommend that CMS now take a more holistic approach that involves implementing a smaller, more harmonized portfolio of APMs.”