Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Acting Administrator Marilyn Tavenner told a conference on Thursday that her agency is working to change the health care delivery system through public and private partnerships fueled by the newly established Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation.

Speaking at the Care Innovation Summit cosponsored by CMS, Tavenner said the government’s move to base payments on the quality of care being delivered across the health care continuum is rapidly approaching. The goal of delivery system and payment reform is starting to happen through CMS programs for shared savings or  accountable care organizations (ACOs), bundled payment projects, and administrative fixes, among other efforts, Tavenner noted.

CMS is also focused on working with Congress on a permanent solution to Medicare’s sustainable growth rate formula crisis, which, if unchecked, will result in a 27 percent cut in physician payments starting March 1, she said.

The director of the CMS innovation center, Richard Gilfillan, also spoke, detailing how he thinks it is possible to use technology like electronic health records and other innovations to coordinate care and in turn cut drastically the rate of hospital readmissions. Providers, like hospitals and long term care facilities, will increasingly be focused on readmissions, which are too high currently, he said.

“Elderly Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries have an 18 percent chance of being readmitted to the hospital,” Gilfillan said.

Even with perfect episodic care, there is not enough coordination for beneficiaries to see the best quality and most efficient health care possible, he noted.

A key element of this change to quality care over quantity is the use of data. Gilfillan said changes in policy have freed voluminous amounts of CMS data for use in improving care, and more data exchanges will result from the bundled payment, medical home, and ACO programs.

Conference organizers were working throughout the day to stimulate fresh ideas on solving health care system pitfalls, with readmissions a key issue, along with disease-specific challenges to help prevent or heal populations affected by diabetes, HIV-AIDS, and cancer, among others.

Don Casey, chief executive officer of the West Wireless Health Institute, said one of the ways to move health care to an outcomes-based, value-based enterprise is to “jailbreak” new technology, which is to bring new technology to the system in a rapid and not incremental fashion. “[We need] to take advantage of the digital revolution.” This will help allow an affordable care delivery system to flourish, Casey said.

More information on the summit is at www.hcidc.org.