Last year, for the first time, CMS's Comprehensive Primary Care the program generated savings: $57.7 million in total on Medicare Part A and Part B spending.
After failing to generate any shared-savings payments for primary care practices in 2013 and 2014, practices in four of the program's seven regions generated shared savings in 2015, Medicare reports.
In 2015, physician practices participating in Medicare's largest value-based payment initiative for primary care generated shared savings for the first time, according to a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services blog post published this week.
The Comprehensive Primary Care initiative was launched in October 2012, with the first year of the program running through December 2013. In the first year of the four-year program, 497 primary care practices participated. Last year, 481 practices participated. The program operates in seven states.
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CPC features a monthly care management fee for participating physician practices that is not tied to patient visits and the opportunity for physician practices to earn shared savings payments from Medicare.
Last year, the program generated $57.7 million in total savings on Medicare Part A and Part B spending, with management fees pegged at $58 million, according to CMS.
Primary care practices in four states—Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and Oregon—generated $13 million in earned shared savings, Conway wrote.
The net gains achieved in Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and Oregon offset net losses in the other three states—New Jersey, New York and Ohio. Despite those losses, "the savings generated in the other four regions covered those losses, such that care management fees across CPC were offset by reduced spending on Medicare Part A and Part B services."
Last year, primary care practices participating in CPC served more than 376,000 Medicare beneficiaries and a total of more than 2.7 million patients, according to CMS.
The modest gains reported this week by Patrick Conway, MD, CMS principal deputy administrator and chief medical officer, in a blog post, mark a significant milestone for CPC, which generated no "statistically significant net savings over the first two years" of the program, according to an annual report on the initiative published in April.
"As the largest test of advanced primary care in U.S. history, CPC demonstrates the potential of primary care clinicians redesigning their practices to deliver better care to their patients, and provides clinicians support to innovate and deliver care in ways that better meet their patients' needs and preferences," Conway wrote.
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In January, CMS is set to launch a two-track successor to CPC: Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+). As many as 2,500 primary care practices are expected to participate in each of the two tracks of the program across 14 regions.
CMS is reviewing applications from primary care practices seeking to participate in CPC+ and the agency plans to announce the list of participating practices before Thanksgiving.