A large-scale advanced illness intervention informs medicare’s new serious illness payment model

Abstract

Patients with advanced illness receive fragmented, hospital-based care that is unaligned with their preferences near the end of life. We describe a team-based intervention that provides home-based, coordinated care to more than 2,000 seriously ill patients daily in nineteen urban, suburban, or rural counties in California. In the last month of life, compared to matched Medicare beneficiaries in similar counties, this program reduced hospital days by 1,361 per 1,000 beneficiaries, hospital deaths by 8.2 percent, inpatient payments by $6,127, and the total cost of care by $5,657 per beneficiary. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced a new Medicare payment model for serious illness care, based in part on this program. To inform model development and implementation, we describe lessons learned about changing the focus of care for advanced illness from hospital to home, broadening care coordination to achieve system integration, and developing methods for payment and quality accountability that transform care delivery.