Hospital admissions among dually eligible Medicare/Medicaid beneficiaries are the target of a new program being launched by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

The goal of the program is to provide better care for long-term nursing home residents and help prevent avoidable hospital admissions among such residents.  Through the program, which will be administered jointly by the CMS’s Medicare-Medicaid Coordinating Office and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), independent organizations working collaboratively with nursing homes.

Funding will be awarded on a competitive basis.  To learn more about the program, the funding, and application deadlines, read this CMS news release.

The Affordable Care Act created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) to explore new and better ways of delivering health care to publicly insured patients and new and better ways of paying for that care.  Now in operation for a year, the Innovation Center had divided itself into different functional components – patient care, community improvement, Medicare demonstrations, and others – and is funding demonstration programs designed to test new ways of delivering and paying for care.

With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Urban Institute has prepared a summary and analysis of the Innovation Center’s mandate, internal organization, approach to it work, and early activities.  Both the full report and a summary of it can be found here, on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s web site.

The federal government has awarded $6 million to 73 selected “innovation advisers” who will experiment with new ways to improve health care and reduce health care costs.

The program, operated by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), has awarded funding to a variety of health care professionals:  doctors, nurses, hospital executives, and health policy and public health officials from 27 states.

Grant recipients are currently receiving training for their year-long participation in the program.  Another round of participants will be chosen in the spring.

Read about the program, how it works, and the kinds of innovations it is pursuing in this Washington Post article.

Created as a laboratory for new and better ways to improve health care and reduce health care costs, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation is one of the centerpieces of the Affordable Care Act and health care reform.

Now that the Innovation Center has been in operation for one year, the Commonwealth Fund has summarized its activities to date:  the initiatives it has launched and the range of those initiatives; the areas in which it is pursuing innovation; and how it is going about its work.

Among the areas addressed in the summary are accountable care organizations (ACOs), Medicare bundled payments, payment reform, programs for dual eligibles, and various demonstration programs.

Read this assessment, including a list of the Innovation Center’s initiatives and their current status, on the Commonwealth Fund’s blog.

As states continue to struggle with budget woes, they are getting more aggressive, and more ambitious, about finding ways to cut their health care costs – and they aren’t waiting for health care reform to kick in to get started.

Oregon, for example, hopes to introduce a new series of community health centers that would provide more integrated care to their patients.  At first the centers would serve only Medicaid and dually eligible (Medicare and Medicaid) patients, but eventually, state officials hope the clinics will serve public employees and teachers and possibly small businesses as well.  Read about Oregon’s plans in this Stateline report.

Massachusetts is focusing its attention on a narrower group:  chronically ill dual eligibles.  The state hopes to move 115,000 such individuals from its Medicaid fee-for-service program to managed care plans.  Learn more about Massachusetts’s plans in this Wall Street Journal article.

With the federal government encouraging states to find new ways to serve their dual-eligible populations and the federal government, through the Affordable Care Act-created Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) providing seed money for such innovation, more states can be expected to begin testing new approaches to serving this population in the…