Since 2016, the Peterson Center on Healthcare has funded a multi-year initiative at CPR to help employers become more effective purchasers of healthcare to improve outcomes for the workforce and reduce the cost of care. The project aims to help purchasers in an ongoing shift toward healthcare that pays hospitals, physicians, and others based on patient outcomes and experience instead of the volume of care they provide.
Through the Center grant, CPR will provide new employer resources designed for both large self-insured employers and smaller firms, who have opportunities to build regional partnerships and enhance their purchasing power.
These resources include online education, tools, events, and small-group collaboratives to help implement and evaluate value-based purchasing strategies that can lead to higher quality care at lower costs.
In 2019, CPR received a grant from the Commonwealth Fund to create new models for aggregating health care purchasing volume. The goal of this project is to enhance the understanding of employers and other health care purchasers, along with policy makers, about how purchasers could succeed at the local level to amass their purchasing power sufficient to make the health care marketplace responsive to their needs for high-quality, accessible, affordable care. CPR is conducting interviews, legal and regulatory research, and literature reviews to assemble insights into the forces that can facilitate or hinder purchaser efforts to amass volume. CPR will release final products from this work in 2021.
For more background on group purchasing and how it can help improve the responsiveness of the health care marketplace, see a 2018 Harvard Business Review article by Commonwealth Fund’s David Blumenthal, Lovisa Gustafsson, and Shawn Bishop.
The New York State Health Foundation (NYSHealth) has awarded CPR a grant to develop the first-ever New York Consumer Empowerment Scorecard. The Consumer Empowerment Scorecard will shine a light on the status of New York’s progress toward creating an environment that empowers consumers to take charge of their health and to participate actively in their own health care and the health care system. The Scorecard will examine policies and practices in the areas of patient engagement, information transparency, and consumer protections, among other issues.
The Scorecard, with intended release in May 2022, would build off of CPR’s successful efforts tracking state-level progress in price transparency and alternative payment models through our Report Cards on State Price Transparency Laws and Scorecards on Payment Reform, respectively. CPR and NYSHealth hope this new Scorecard can serve as a model for other states to benchmark progress against each other and share best practices in the critical area of consumer empowerment.