Microcapitation: Prometheus Catches Fire

Microcapitation: Prometheus Catches Fire

Prometheus (prə-mē’thē-əs) n.

  1. A Titan who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humankind, for which Zeus chained him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver, which grew back daily.
  2. A personification of the unconquerable will opposing greater power, forever chained and suffering but confident of the ultimate triumph of his cause.

The second health financing innovation with relevance to the Healthcare XPRIZE was highlighted in the most recent New England Journal of Medicine article. The Prometheus Payment Model has been a longstanding project of Francoise De Brantes (of Bridges to Excellence fame) and folks like Doug Emery who have been beating the “episodes of care based” financing for years. I have had some great conversations with Francois and Doug over the years and I am pleased to see their ideas actually being implemented in some pilots sponsored by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation.

Prometheus is a payment concept based on clearly defined episodes of care  wherein all the services provided can be bundled together in discrete “Care Packages” (not everything fits neatly into this construct as they note). These Care Packages are then assigned a global budget from which all care providers must deliver their services (technical term is Evidence Informed Case Rate). The Care Packages are further adjusted for patient severity as well as for Avoidable Patient Complications (APC). These are things like hospital acquired infections, exacerbation of chronic conditions, or other events that if optimally managed would not have occurred.  This payment model rewards providers for organizing along the entire episode of care. It clearly is a move away from independent, discrete payments for disconnected care to a new model of continuous view of all the events that make up the episode. The global budget for a clearly defineable event creates financial incentives toward high performance and quality outcomes.

I was the first to call this new payment model “Microcapitation“, and describe further in another post. The NEJM article is a good read, and highlights many of the talking points that I strongly believe in:

  • Rewards for value not volume
  • Rewards for quality not quantity
  • Rewards for the organization and coordination of care
  • Provides a financial integration mechanism for non-integrated providers to work together
  • Provides financial incentives to reward the above
  • Leaves plenty of room for innovation and improvements underneath the global budget.

I  hope to see the Prometheus model gain additional traction. A variation of this concept and much simpler to follow is the highly successful “Proven Care” model employed by Geisinger (see their excellent website describing the development process and the elements of their Angioplasty episode of care). I am encouraged to see these begin to flourish as part of the ongoing efforts of health care innovators.

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