ET3 is an exciting opportunity for our country’s great first responders to expand the care they provide. We’re grateful for the work they do today, and we appreciate how excited they are about this model. Together, this effort is going to save lives and improve the quality of care.
As Prepared for Delivery
Thank you, Chief Dean, for welcoming us here today, and thank you everyone for coming to join us at what has to be the most interesting place we’ve ever rolled out a CMS payment model.
I’d like to begin by thanking Administrator Verma for the key role she’s played in the thinking we’ve done across HHS about the transformation of our health system into one that pays for value.
I’m also grateful to Adam Boehler, my senior advisor for value-based transformation, for the work he’s done to turn our leadership vision into reality, including with today’s announcement.
Today is an exciting day to celebrate one piece of our vision that will now become reality: rethinking how our system provides emergency care and transport.
It’s appropriate that this is one of the first major value-based models we’ve rolled out, because getting an emergency medical service is one of the most stressful experiences any of us could have in healthcare.
We’ve identified a part of that system that is in obvious need of improvement.
Today, Medicare only pays first responders if they bring you to the hospital or a few other alternative sites—which you may not need, which may be really expensive, and which may not be the best place for you to get care.
There is an important, basic healthcare lesson here: You get what you pay for. When you essentially only pay for people to get taken to the hospital, people get taken to the hospital!
That’s why Adam’s team at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation has created the Emergency Triage, Treat and Transport payment model, or ET3.
ET3 will create a new set of incentives for emergency transport and care, ensuring patients get convenient, appropriate treatment in whatever setting makes sense for them.
ET3 is an exciting opportunity for our country’s great first responders to expand the care they provide. We’re grateful for the work they do today, and we appreciate how excited they are about this model. Together, this effort is going to save lives and improve the quality of care.
But I also want everyone to look at the bigger picture, beyond emergency services. ET3 is a signal to everyone involved in American healthcare that we want to rethink how and where patients are treated.
A value-based healthcare system will deliver each patient the right care, at the right price, in the right setting, from the right provider. In many cases, that may look a lot different from what a patient typically receives today.
ET3 shows that we can radically rethink the incentives around care delivery even in one of the trickiest parts of our system. So I want everyone to stay tuned, and work with us, regarding other areas where we can reimagine care delivery to lower costs and save lives.
Thank you all again for being here.
I now want to hand things over to Administrator Verma, who will say a bit about how value-based transformation fits into her vision for CMS programs overall, and what it can mean for beneficiaries.
