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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — RTI International, a nonprofit research institute, announced it was awarded a $52 million, five-year contract to provide the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) with program analysis and operational support for CMS’ Medicare Shared Savings Program (Shared Savings Program).
The Shared Savings Program offers providers and suppliers, such as physicians, hospitals, and others involved in patient care, an opportunity to create an accountable care organization (ACO) which agrees to be held accountable for the quality, cost, and experience of care of an assigned Medicare fee-for-service beneficiary population.
“We are thrilled to continue our collaboration with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to support further transformation of the U.S. health care system,” said Maggie Cole-Beebe, co-project director and director of the Payment Model Design and Implementation program at RTI International. “In addition to program operations, we look forward to providing ongoing support as CMS responds to a changing health care and policy landscape — whether addressing a global pandemic or refining program methodology — with complex analyses and support for codifying program changes through rulemaking.”
RTI’s operational support for the Shared Savings Program includes analytics for screening and managing the providers and suppliers who apply to and participate in ACOs; beneficiary attribution; quality measurement analyses; financial calculations, including establishing annual targets and shared savings/losses; developing a variety of data reports and files for CMS, ACOs, and public use; and providing technical assistance, education, and outreach to ACOs. RTI also supports public comment review with its innovative SmartReview tool, which uses an automated data pipeline, natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to prioritize, cluster, and tag the most likely relevant comments for rapid review.
Under this contract RTI will also continue to support quality measurement for the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), the program that determines Medicare provider payment adjustments based on quality performance.
