IHA Receives $2.9M AHRQ Grant to Pursue Demo on Bundled Payments

Last August 2 hospitals were to start the project but I have not heard much more than the announcement that was made at that time between Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the UCLA Health System and Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach for charging lump-sum fees for hip and knee replacements. The IHA association it looks like there’s a bit more money here to further study how to do this. You can read further and see that ultimately there are a lot more participants to come to include the Tenet System of hospitals in southern California.

Southern California Hospitals To Begin Offering Lump Sum Fees for Hip and Knee Replacements

The National Accountable Care Organization Congress Is Born

From the IHA Website:

“The Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA) is a statewide leadership group that promotes quality improvement, accountability, and affordability of health care in California. IHA is a nonprofit association working to actively convene all healthcare parties for cross sector collaboration on health care topics. IHA administers regional and statewide programs and serves as an incubator for pilot programs and projects.
IHA membership includes major health plans, physician groups, and hospital systems, plus academic, consumer, purchaser, pharmaceutical and technology representatives. IHA's principal projects include pay for performance, the measurement and reward of efficiency in health care, value based purchasing of medical devices, health care affordability, bundled episode of care payments, and prevention programs directed at obesity.”

This all comes about the same time ICD10 and SNOMED are on the agenda too, so a challenge it is. The group also has other projects they work on, like pay for performance and accountable care organizations. It’s a challenge to work all this in when taking care of patients and all the extremely complicated payment systems. BD

The Integrated Healthcare Association has been awarded a three-year, $2.9 million grant by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to demonstrate bundled payments for physicians, hospitals and other providers and to evaluate their effectiveness compared to current payment methods in California, according to an IHA news release.
The demonstration funded by AHRQ will build on existing small pilot funded by the California HealthCare Foundation in Los Angeles and Orange counties and expand the project statewide. It will eventually involve 20 teams of physicians, hospitals, surgery centers and other providers.

Participants include:
• Physician Organizations: Brown & Toland Medical Group, HealthCare Partners, Monarch HealthCare and St. Joseph Heritage Healthcare.
• Hospitals: Cedars-Sinai, Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, Huntington Hospital, Mission Hospital, Saddleback Memorial Medical Center, St. Joseph Hospital, St. Jude Medical Center, Tenet California and UCLA Medical Center.
• Ambulatory Surgery Centers: Monterey Peninsula Surgery Centers.
• Health Plans: Aetna, Blue Shield of California, Cigna and HealthNet.