One feature of the Affordable Care Act that doesn’t get a lot of ink was the creation of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Innovation Center. With the very real prospect of an ACA repeal, the Innovation Center’s future is in doubt. As Neal Versel noted in his column for Fortune on the Republican replacement bill to the ACA, the new bill is remarkably thin on the subjects of health IT, innovation and new care delivery models.
The CMS Innovation Center has been responsible for funding new ideas and technology systems that help hospitals and other providers manage the health of populations.
For instance, Christiana Care Health System in Wilmington, Del., won a $10 million grant in 2012 from the CMS Innovation Center to begin building a predictive analytics computer system. That system has helped to reduce avoidable hospital readmissions and improved population health management by identifying patients for care interventions before chronic health conditions become acute. (I wrote about Christiana Care in a recent article on the adoption of predictive analytics by health systems.)
The CMS Innovation Center has a useful website where reporters can search on grants and projects by state and/or care model. The CMS also issues reports on how the money is being used by grantees. The latest one was issued this month.
Checking up on how providers in your region have spent their innovation grant dollars and what the results have been so far can offer a new (and local) angle to the debate over the ACA replacement.
