Maverick's Update

Perfection is generally an unattainable goal, but 14-year-old Chinese diver Quan Hongchan managed it twice with two impossible-looking dives at the Olympics that earned the top score of “10” from all seven judges. Sadly, her family’s health care story isn’t perfect — apparently this young girl got into diving competitively to help support her sick mother. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Innovation Center (“CMMI”) isn’t perfect either, but it is trying to figure out a way to make sure that 14-year-olds aren’t paying for the healthcare of their sick mothers. CMMI is the federal agency that tests new healthcare payment models. On August 4, 2021, it released its report to Congress on its latest economic experiments, explaining how it not only “leveraged technology and data” but that “model testing in a performance-based payment environment depends on technology and data” to reduce burden, improve outcomes, and evaluate performance. CMMI reported, for instance, that for its Comprehensive Primary Care Plus Model, it collected data on 3,000 practices to help figure out how they may succeed in value-based care arrangements. In the future, CMMI intends to give model test participants better access to meaningful data and analytics. Maybe CMMI is taking a cue from China — which is using its data analytics and technology superpowers to win the most gold medals at the Olympics. Maybe this will spur Congress to revisit its proposals to invest in tech and science resources? But more than gold medals, we need emerging technologies and better data analytics for so many reasons, as the American Institute of Physics reports here.