Is it time to put a fork in fee-for-service?

New research released by Morning Consult and Innovaccer finds most providers believe it is. Respondents said value-based care has firmly displaced fee-for-service as the dominant payment and care delivery model. Only 4% of providers surveyed reported using pure FFS with no links to quality and value, and that plummets to 1% by 2025. Providers believe the payment model that’s historically dominated in healthcare has flamed out, and that 96% of healthcare payment today has connections to care quality, cost reductions and, in some cases, patient experience. That leaps to 99% by 2025.

But is FFS really over? Payers report that pure FFS remains in the double digits within their provider networks. While providers think the transition to value has substantially occurred, we are only at the beginning of the transition to value. The amount of financial risk providers have is going to increase significantly in the next few years. This research makes it clear that providers don’t have the tools, analytics, and processes to know how they're performing on risk-based contracts and see a risk-based tsunami is coming. MACRA (the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act) links an ever-increasing portion of physician payments to service-value rather than service-volume. Every provider that participates in Medicare is having their Part B payment adjusted based upon MACRA’s value-based care timeline.