Goal is to spread innovation nationwide
WASHINGTON–The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has selected 73 health professionals from 27 states as innovation advisors to help guide healthcare reform.
The advisors, selected from 920 applications, will work with CMS to test and refine new models of care, CMS officials said. The agency launched the program in October, naming the advisors on Jan. 3. The program is part of the Accountable Care Act.
“We want [the advisors] to discover and generate new ideas that will work and help us bring them to every corner of the United States,” said Rick Gilfillan, director of the CMS Innovation Center.
The advisors themselves seem to be as excited about the work as CMS officials are. "The most exciting element of the CMS Innovation Advisors program is its role as a learning network,” Clay Akerly, MD, told Healthcare IT News. Akerly is one of two advisors selected from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“They are building a community of diverse individuals with a common interest in care improvement (through IT or other enablers) and coupling it with their other ongoing investments in care redesign. This is a promising combination,” said Akerly of CMS.
Gary Christensen, COO and CIO of the Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI) in Providence, RI said it was “a little bit humbling” to be selected from the 920 applications CMS received.
“I’m really jazzed about the program,” he said. “It’s a combo of things, some training and some educating on innovation, in general, and on change management to foster innovators that can drive change in our local communities on into the future.”
Each advisor is responsible for working on a project toward CMS’ goals. Akerly’s project will aim toward improving care for the elderly. RIQI’s project is a general roll-out of a function the organization has built, called provider notification, Christensen explained.
The system provides doctors notification if one of their patients is discharged from a hospital. “One of the things in our fragmented healthcare system is that doctors sometimes don’t even know their patient was in the hospital,” said Christensen. With this notification, doctors can monitor a patient’s care and often prevent a 30-day or 90-day readmission. RIQI will try to drive the use of this monitoring system across the entire provider base in Rhode Island.
“This is a great opportunity for me, the institute and the state because we’ll have access to people with really cool ideas,” Christensen added. “We’ll have a lot of visibility into each other’s work. I’m hoping to find some real gems out there.”
