Anjali N.C. Downs, Jennifer E. Michael, Victoria Vaskov Sheridan, and Lesley R. Yeung, Members of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, co-authored an article in the Journal of Health Care Compliance, titled “Are We There Yet? OIG and CMS Issue Long-Awaited Final Rules Aimed at Promoting Innovative Value-Based Care Models and Arrangements.”

Following is an excerpt (see below to download the full version in PDF format):

Traditionally, the U.S. health care system has relied on a fee-for-service (FFS) payment methodology, pursuant to which reimbursement is made for each item or service provided, regardless of cost or the result­ing patient outcomes. Due to the unsustainable ongoing increase in health care costs, however, the paradigm is shifting to a value-driven system whereby payors pay for the value of the health care items and services pro­viders deliver—as measured by improving health out­comes and quality, reducing costs, or both—rather than the volume of services they provide. Value-based care models and arrangements include a wide variety of per­formance-based payment strategies that link financial incentives to health care providers’ performance on a set of defined measures that are designed to achieve bet­ter value.

Both public and private payors are using various value-based care strategies in an effort to drive improve­ments in quality and to slow the growth in health care spending. Value-based care strategies range from pay­ing incentives to providers for achieving quality and/ or reducing costs to requiring providers to assume a degree of financial risk in providing services to a partic­ular patient population. However, as stakeholders seek to shift from traditional FFS reimbursement to value-based care models and arrangements, they face sig­nificant regulatory and operational barriers, including obstacles posed by the traditional fraud and abuse laws that generally prohibit the exchange of remuneration relating to items or services covered by federal health care programs.

Recognizing the need to address the impediments the fraud and abuse laws pose to the adoption of coordinated care and value-based care arrangements, on December 2, 2020, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published long-awaited companion final rules to revise the anti-kickback statute (AKS) safe har­bors and the civil monetary penalties (CMP) rules, and the federal physician self-referral law (commonly referred to as the “Stark law”) exceptions, respectively.1 While the final rules address a variety of arrangements and modify various exist­ing regulations, they focus heavily on care coordination and value-based care.

This article focuses on the new value-based safe harbors and exceptions under the AKS and Stark law, and compares and contrasts the agencies’ rules. The new value-based safe harbors and exceptions offer entities new ways to provide remu­neration that is tied to measures taken to achieve desired outcomes, rather than the performance of a service. Questions remain, however, regarding whether these safe harbors and exceptions ultimately will promote innovative value-based care arrangements and how OIG and CMS will interpret and enforce these arrangements going forward.

Jump to Page

Privacy Preference Center

When you visit any website, it may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. This information might be about you, your preferences or your device and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to. The information does not usually directly identify you, but it can give you a more personalized web experience. Because we respect your right to privacy, you can choose not to allow some types of cookies. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings. However, blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable information.

Performance Cookies

These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.