Partnership For Patients Initiative Renewed
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
New round of Hospital Engagement Network contracts opens to reduce readmissions.
The Affordable Care Act helped to spawn The Partnership for Patients, a nation-wide public-private collaboration that began in April 2011 with the goal of reducing preventable hospital-acquired conditions by 40 percent and 30-day readmissions by 20 percent. The first wave of this initiative ended in December 2014.
Now, the CMS Innovation Center is launching a new round of contracts to renew the initiative, according to a CMS blog post. A recent Department of Health and Human Services report found that, between 2010 and 2013, an estimated 50,000 fewer patients died in hospitals and reductions in hospital-acquired conditions saved approximately $12 billion in healthcare costs.
According to the CMS blog post, these advances in patient outcomes came as a result of “concerted attention by hospitals throughout the country to reduce adverse events” as well as ACA provisions including Medicare payment incentives to improve the quality of care, and the HHS Partnership for Patients initiative.
Among the key elements of the initiative are Hospital Engagement Networks, Community-Based Care Transitions Programs, and Patient and Family Engagement.
Through the Partnership for Patients, 26 state, regional, national, and hospital system organizations serve as Hospital Engagement Networks, which identify solutions already working to reduce hospital-acquired conditions, and work to spread them to other hospitals and health care providers.
The Community-Based Care Transitions Program includes 47 sites, each of which constitutes a collaborative community effort including community-based organizations, testing models for improving care transitions from the hospital to other settings and for reducing readmissions for high-risk Medicare beneficiaries.
The Patient and Family Engagement pillar of the initiative is also critical to the success of the Partnership. The relationship between health care professionals and their patients and families helps prevent patients from getting injured or sicker in the hospital and helping patients heal without complication through improved transitions across health care settings and reduced readmissions.
“We are committed to making even greater progress keeping people as safe and healthy as possible,” Dr. Patrick Conway, chief medical officer for the CMS and its deputy administrator for innovation and quality, said in the CMS blog post.