Established by the Affordable Care Act, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) is a "new engine for revitalizing and sustaining Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and ultimately for improving the health care system for all Americans. The Innovation Center has the resources and flexibility to rapidly test innovative care and payment models and encourage widespread adoption of practices that deliver better health care at lower cost." One of three elements of the Center is the population health models group. The potential to start moving the healthcare system toward community prevention and equity as core elements fo their efforts through this mechanism is significant
Prevention Institute, along with other public health leaders, has been working with the CMMI to share learnings and make recommendations for addressing a key area that the CMMI is tasked with: strengthening population health.
In a joint letter, Prevention Institute, American State and Territorial Health Officials, National Association of County and City Health Officials, Trust for America's Health and the America Public Health Association put forward key principles, based on decades of public health practice and research, that can be used to guide and shape CMMI population health test cases. The recommendations address the environmental, social, and behavioral determinants of health—including prioritizing equity, emphasizing policy and environmental change, selecting strategies that yield multiple health benefits, and marshaling diverse fields to improve community conditions.
Read the joint letter.
In a separate letter, Prevention Institute makes recommendations for a demonstration project that would integrate community prevention into health services delivery, specifically through a model we think holds enormous promise for improving health, providing comprehensive care, and reducing costs: the Community-Centered Health Home. It is aimed at delineating the roles for clinical staff that fit with their perspective and niche, and new partnerships between clinical and community providers—to ensure less people get sick and injured in the first place and to sustain the health of those who do.
In February of 2011, Prevention Institute released the report, Community-Centered Health Homes: Bridging the gap between health services and community prevention, which presents a model for how clinical providers can advance community prevention while simultaneously delivering high-quality medical services. This model was shaped by merging learnings about community prevention with the experiences of a few health care centers across the country taking action to address the community conditions impacting the health status of their patient.
Read Prevention Institute's letter.
CMMI has an incredibly important opportunity to support and promulgate pioneering models and practices for effective linkages between the health care delivery system, which has the vast majority of health resources, and the public health system, which has the tools, expertise, and mandate to improve health and safety outcomes at a population level. By bringing these two systems together, CMMI could achieve substantial results in terms of population health improvements and health care cost savings. CMMI is inviting interested parties to share their ideas to "help build the Center and to help identify innovative ideas about how care can be delivered and paid for." We invite you to visit their website and make the case for prevention as a critical component of innovative care.
