The final rule from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regulating “episode-of-care” Medicare payments to hospitals for hip and knee replacements includes a postponed start date of April 1, 2016. The originally proposed implementation date was January 1, 2016.
Approximately 800 hospitals nationwide are subject to the new payment model, which makes hospitals eligible for bonuses or penalties, depending on their quality and cost performance from the day of patient admission to 90 days post-discharge. Based on comments about the initial rule by 400 key stakeholders, CMS also agreed to eliminate penalty payments during the first year of implementation.
Because the CMS model—dubbed Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement, or CJR—permits gainsharing, individual orthopaedic surgeons could benefit financially if hospitals they are affiliated with receive bonuses. The AAOS commended CMS for revising the methodology for calculating the composite quality score and said that the delayed implementation “adds some flexibility,” but the group is still calling for CMS to “postpose the mandatory implementation feature of the program until at least 85 percent of providers have attained meaningful use [of EHRs] or another metric of infrastructure readiness.”