Alternative Payment Models
AAHPM advocates for reimbursement mechanisms that will ensure the practice of hospice and palliative medicine is viable and appropriately recognized for the value it adds to care for patients with serious illness. Towards this end, the Academy has worked with other stakeholder medical specialty societies to advance new CPT® codes for advance care planning and chronic care management services.
The Patient and Caregiver Support for Serious Illness (PACSSI)
As fundamental changes take place in care payment and delivery, AAHPM saw an opportunity to identify gaps in payment and develop strategies to support and encourage the interdisciplinary nature of palliative care teams. To that end, AAHPM convened an Alternative Payment Model (APM) Task Force in 2016, which represents the diversity of palliative care teams serving Medicare beneficiaries across many communities. The task force engaged in an open and collaborative effort to identify and address gaps in care for patients with serious illness and craft a payment strategy that would support palliative care teams of different sizes, organizational structures, and geographies in the delivery of effective, high-value care.
The Patient and Caregiver Support for Serious Illness (PACSSI) model emerged from this work as one of two payment reforms developed by the Academy designed to improve care for patients with serious illness. We believe the PACSSI model holds great promise for both improving quality of care for Medicare beneficiaries with serious illness and reducing costs for the Medicare program.
To gain a better understanding of the development process for PACSSI:
- watch the Behind the Scenes Video of the Alternative Payment Model Summit
- read a PACSSI feature in the AAHPM Quarterly.
AAHPM’s proposal has been reviewed in a public meeting of the PTAC, which voted to recommend PACSSI to the Secretary of Health and Human Services for a limited-scale Medicare payment demonstration. An announcement from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation about what their final demonstration will look like is expected in coming months.
Payment Comment Letters
AAHPM regularly provides comments on physician reimbursement and payment proposals to a host of government agencies in an effort to advocate for the practice of hospice and palliative medicine.