WIHI: The Newest Innovator on the Block: Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation

Date: February 24, 2011

Featuring:

• Rick Gilfillan, MD, Acting Director, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation

Most of us are familiar with the various demonstration projects the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has sponsored over the years. This year CMS is taking the notion of figuring out “what works” when it comes to better patient care to an entirely new level, with the launch of the Innovation Center at CMS.

Rick Gilfillan, fresh from helping to redesign payment methods at the Geisinger Health System to align with quality outcomes — and gaining national recognition as a result — is now applying his passion for improvement to the country as a whole. As the Innovation Center ramps up, Dr. Gilfillan is eager to keep everyone up to date with what’s on the broader agenda and what’s most immediately in store.

WIHI host Madge Kaplan talks with Dr. Gilfillan, who explains the strategy behind the Innovation Center and the prospects for seeding much more robust work with both new payment and service delivery models. Dr. Gilfillan is not alone in believing that a lot of great models exist already. The challenge comes in first harnessing these best practices and then spreading them. It’s this last issue that he has been hearing about in spades; the need to diffuse new models quickly and effectively has never been greater and requires a national learning network and infrastructure that currently doesn’t exist, but can be created.