CMS taps Mathematica, Deloitte to improve effectiveness of its healthcare models

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has launched a project to help its innovation unit scale the deployment of effective healthcare payment and service delivery models.

Mathematica first announced the effort in an Aug. 24 press release, saying the agency selected both the firm and Deloitte to jointly support the development of the new four-year Learning Insights for Action initiative for the CMS Innovation Center.

“We’ll bring our expertise in data, evidence, and continuous learning to help CMS identify what’s working and put those insights into practice more broadly — supporting more efficient use of resources and stronger program performance,” Matthew Kehn, director of Mathematica’s program and model operations practice, said in a statement.

The CMS Innovation Center was created by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — colloquially known as Obamacare — and develops and designs alternative payment models to reduce costs across the Medicare, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program.

In a statement to Nextgov/FCW, a CMS spokesperson said the LIA project “represents the expansion of CMS’ ongoing work to leverage model data to identify high-performing participants and study the strategies behind their successes.”

“Deloitte and Mathematica’s analytics expertise and capabilities will support CMS’ goal to scale these approaches to more models and increase the dissemination and uptake of successful approaches with model participants through targeted learning events, resources, and industry sharing,” the spokesperson added. “This four-year contract will enable CMS to efficiently target resources across models with varying periods of performance and support cross-model learning.”