The American Institutes for Research Partners with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to Improve Primary Care Practices
Patient Reports Will Inform Assessment of Primary Care Performance
Washington, D.C. — The American Institutes for Research (AIR) has been selected to lead a world-class team of experts in health care quality to measure patient experiences and outcomes in the largest undertaking to date by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to transform primary care practice in America—the Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) model. Through the CPC+ model, Medicare is concurrently testing service delivery and payment innovations. CPC+ incentive payments help practices make structural advances while incentivizing improvements in patient outcomes and lowering costs.
The contract with CMS will provide clinicians and patients with useful, patient-reported measures to improve care and support an expanded primary care model currently being tested with nearly 3,000 practices. Primary care practices are expected to transform care to all patients by improving five areas: care management; access and continuity; planned care for population health; patient and caregiver engagement; and comprehensiveness and coordination.
As leaders in health care quality measurement and assessment, specializing in both patient-reported outcome measures and Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Provider and Systems® surveys, AIR, along with experts from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Mathematica Policy Research, will collaborate with CMS to identify, test, and implement patient-reported outcomes measures for CPC+ practices that lead to gaining National Quality Forum endorsement. The AIR team also will support implementation of the patient experience survey, data analysis, and reporting of survey results for all participating practices.
Kathryn Paez, Ph.D., the CPC+ project director and principal researcher at AIR, stated, “AIR and our expert team see this as a groundbreaking opportunity to work with CMS to bring the patient perspective into primary care practices, and to ultimately improve the patient experience.”
The team will be led by Principal Investigator San Keller, Ph.D., of AIR; Julie Young of AIR; Co-Principal Investigator Albert Wu, M.D., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Karen Bogen, Ph.D., of Mathematica; and overall director Kathryn Paez, Ph.D., of AIR.
About AIR
Established in 1946, with headquarters in Washington, D.C., the American Institutes for Research (AIR) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization that conducts behavioral and social science research and delivers technical assistance both domestically and internationally in the areas of health, education, and workforce productivity. For more information, visit www.air.org.
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