CMS: Care management pilot off to good start

Some physicians are welcoming the extra help keeping an eye on Medicare patients, but others question whether the contractors are necessary.

By David Glendinning, AMNews staff. March 6, 2006.

Washington -- Medicare's care management demonstration project recently reached a milestone when enrollment of chronically ill beneficiaries passed the 100,000 patient mark.

The federal government says the program lightens doctors' loads, but some physicians remain skeptical that the outside intervention will be helpful.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced the new enrollment numbers for the Medicare Health Support demonstration project last month.

The three-year pilot, which started a staggered rollout in eight areas of the country last August, seeks to use third-party disease management firms to help maintain and improve chronically ill seniors' health.

Although the firms have been operating in Medicare for only a few months, physicians and patients are already responding well to the project, said Herb Kuhn, director of the CMS Center for Medicare Management. He said an agency report on the demonstration in early 2007 would help determine how well the plan is working.

"On the ground, the reports that we're getting are that physicians seem to be very pleased with this," he said.

"They now have another partner in the care team that is not there to get between the physician and the patient, but rather to support the patient -- to make sure that when physicians give patients their care instructions, someone is there to help them with their education, to help them with their self-care burdens and to make sure that they follow up on those instructions," Kuhn said.