Medicare’s Investment in Primary Care Shows Progress

On October 17, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) initiative’s second round of shared savings results, with nearly all practices (95 percent) meeting quality of care requirements and four out of seven regions sharing in savings with CMS. These results reflect the work of 481 practices that served over 376,000 Medicare beneficiaries and more than 2.7 million patients overall in 2015.

During 2015, its second shared savings performance year, CPC generated a total of $57.7 million gross savings in Part A and Part B expenditures. These savings are essentially equivalent to the $58 million paid in care management fees to the practices.

In addition to the gross Medicare savings, CPC practices showed positive quality, with lower than expected hospital admission and readmission rates, and favorable performance on patient experience measures. CPC practices’ performance on electronic clinical quality measures also exceeded national benchmarks, particularly on preventive health measures.