New study finds significant and growing payment reform activity

Today's Health Affairs blog features a post from Dr. Michael Painter with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on how we can no longer rely on the way we predominantly pay for health care. It's also the introduction for the latest Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute (HCI3) Issue Brief on the results of a recent independent study on bundled payment efforts across the U.S.

Of the 19 studied bundled payment health care reimbursement implementation sites in process in the U.S., half are operational, and the remaining are continuing to progress in their implementations.

Conducted by Megan Burns and Michael Baillit, the report details the current real world state of bundled payments and examines how medical conditions are addressed, how bundles are defined, risk is distributed and payments are made.