Incorporating Health IT into Primary Care Transformation
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Associated Project
Evaluating the Nation's Largest Primary Care Delivery Model: Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+)
Prepared for:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation
Key Findings
- Health IT vendors and practices reported advances in registries and dashboards for improved information management within the practice over the course of CPC+.
- Practices reported increased support for health IT implementation through partnerships with health IT vendors.
- Several challenges arose for developing and implementing more transformative health IT change during CPC+, particularly for interoperable health information exchange needed to support care management and care coordination.
Objectives
To understand the role of health information technology (IT) vendors and health IT functionality in supporting advanced primary care.
Study Design
We synthesized multiple rounds of surveys and interviews (2017-2022) from a mixed-methods evaluation of Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+), a multipayer model developed by CMS. CPC+ was the first federal advanced primary care reform effort that formalized health IT vendors’ roles in supporting health IT implementation and specified detailed health IT requirements for practices.
Methods
We conducted content analysis to identify cross-cutting themes related to health IT for both practices and vendors, comparing similarities and differences across participants and (when possible) over time.
Results
Vendors and practices reported advances in registries and dashboards for improved information management within the practice as well as strengthened relationships between vendors and practices that supported health IT implementation. However, CPC+ practices noted several gaps or challenges using existing functionalities, and both vendors and practices reported broader challenges for more transformative health IT change, particularly the lack of interoperable health information exchange needed to support care management and care coordination. Key factors constraining vendors’ investment in further advances included long product development schedules, making it difficult to respond to rapidly evolving model requirements. Vendors also shared that CPC+ practices represented a small fraction of their client base, so investing in developing new functionality was not strategic unless it was more broadly relevant outside CPC+.
Conclusions
Continued collaboration among health IT vendors, practices, policy makers, and payers could support continued technological improvements, particularly related to information exchange and communication. Aligning requirements more closely with other federal and private models could also help mitigate the risk for vendors.
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