This new four-year payment phase of the Initiative, slated to begin fall 2016, will be implemented through cooperative agreements with six ECCPs. The six awardees are:

Alabama Quality Assurance Foundation – Alabama
HealthInsight of Nevada – Nevada and Colorado

Indiana University – Indiana
The Curators of the University of Missouri – Missouri
The Greater New York Hospital Foundation, Inc. – New York
UPMC Community Provider Services – Pennsylvania
The new model will be subject to a rigorous independent evaluation to determine the effects on cost and quality of care. ECCP awardees will implement the payment model with both their existing partner facilities, where they provide training and clinical interventions, and in a comparable number of additional facilities to be recruited over the next several months.

The Initiative is a collaboration of the CMS Medicare-Medicaid Coordination Office and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, both created by the Affordable Care Act to test payment models to improve health care quality and reduce costs in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The Initiative complements broader administration efforts to improve long-term care facilities, including proposed updates to the conditions of participation for nursing homes, improvements to the five-star rating system for consumers, and implementation of the new Skilled Nursing Facility Quality Reporting Program that ties skilled nursing facility payment to the reporting of quality measures.

For more information on this Initiative, including both current activities and this new phase, please visit https://www.cms.gov/Medicare-Medicaid-Coordination/Medicare-and-Medicaid-Coordination/Medicare-Medicaid-Coordination-Office/InitiativetoReduceAvoidableHospitalizations/AvoidableHospitalizationsamongNursingFacilityResidents.html.

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