August 11, 2016
By Andy Slavitt, Acting Administrator, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
By Andy Slavitt, Acting Administrator, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
Delivering on the
Promise of Better Care for Older Adults
Since becoming acting administrator, I
have spoken frequently about to the importance of moving to the next
chapter in implementing the Affordable Care Act. This new chapter goes beyond
providing people with quality, affordable coverage – but making sure that we
are delivering patient-centered care to all consumers at critical stages of
their lives.
What does that look like? It looks like more individualized care
– care that allows people to heal, recover, and age in their homes and
communities; care that is coordinated so we avoid people falling through the
cracks; and care that includes family members and the realities of all the
things that impact our health like culture, nutrition, and other social
factors. For the growing number of aging and frail Americans, many living with
Alzheimer's, it looks like PACE.
The Programs of All-inclusive Care for the
Elderly (PACE) is a Medicare and Medicaid program that helps
people meet their health care needs in the community in which they
live instead of a nursing home or other care facility. The focus is on the
participant. A team of health care professionals works to make sure that care
is coordinated in the home, the community, and at a PACE center.
Today, CMS proposed the first major update to the PACE
program in a decade. This proposal will help the program reflect the latest
advances in caring for frail elders and changes in the use
of technology. The goal of this proposal is to strengthen
beneficiary protections and provide PACE organizations with more administrative
and operational flexibilities so they can do what they do best –
caring for our nation’s most vulnerable individuals. While PACE serves a
relatively small number of people today, our proposal is intended to encourage
states to further expand these programs.
Our proposals aim to offer the kind of common sense supports to
allow older adults to get the best care possible. For example, individual
care team members would be able to serve more than one role in addressing the
wide spectrum of a participant's needs, rather than just the one role they are
permitted to occupy today. This would help better coordinate services, while
providing important flexibility to care providers.
We also propose more modern and simplified administrative and
operational rules to enhance PACE organizations’ ability to do a
number of things more easily, including a more automated application process to
speed up and customize services to participants.
Over the last six years, since the onset of the Affordable Care
Act, we have been taking significant steps to care for more people, care for
them better, and make health care more affordable. But for us to be successful,
we need to work hand-in-hand with patients and their families, physicians and
clinicians, and other actors to support new approaches to care. Team-based
models that put the individual in the center, like PACE, will be a vital part
of the fabric of our system.
We must work hard to support these approaches so our country can
continue to provide our people with the care they need in the years
ahead.
Learn more about the proposed rule to update and modernize PACE
at https://www.cms.gov/Newsroom/MediaReleaseDatabase/Fact-sheets/2016-Fact-sheets-items/2016-08-11.html.
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