Regarding
Issue Brief #1 (provider surveys), advocates urge that the results of
consumer experience of care surveys should be made public to use as tools for
choosing care and as a lever to improve care quality, SIM must ensure that
results of surveys are used constructively within practices to address gaps,
and SIM should provide practices with low scores assistance to improve patient
experience of care.
Regarding
Issue Brief #2 (payment), advocates are very concerned with proposed
options #b and c which would seriously undermine the quality goals of SIM by
assuring no payment to providers for care coordination and other important care
management services beyond 18 months, despite strong evidence that these
value-added services significantly improve the quality and efficiency of care,
regardless of whether shared savings are produced. Advocates believe that
services that promise to improve value, whether traditional treatments such as
drugs or new, innovative services such as care management, should be treated
equally.
Regarding
Issue Brief # 3 (glade path administration), advocates are very concerned
both with the consolidation of administration and standard-setting under one
very new state agency, and with the assumption underlying that proposal: that
the successful patient-centered medical homes model based on NCQA
accreditation, performing very well in CT’s Medicaid program and generally
accepted throughout the US health care delivery system as the appropriate
certification standard, should be abandoned in favor of some new, CT-specific, yet-to-be
developed standard. There is a large body of evidence that NCQA accredited PCMHs
are associated with improved health outcomes and there is a growing list of
almost 1000 certified PCMHs in CT currently. If advanced standards are
necessary, although there is no evidence they are, CT should follow the lead of
a few other states by requiring those standards in addition to NCQA
certification. CT should build on what is working, not dismantle it.
