The Winding Path To Effective Bundled Payment

Tom Williams and Jill Yegian’s excellent blog post makes a great companion to our recent paper on the evaluation of the Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA) Bundled Payment Demonstration. Williams and Yegian offer lessons from their experience implementing a demonstration project that failed to meet its original objectives. This type of analysis is essential. It’s not unusual for a demonstration to fall short of its original objectives. Learning from such cases is part of the innovation process. This is especially worthwhile for bundled payment, which has many potential benefits for patients, providers, and payers. None of the barriers encountered in IHA’s demonstration signal a “death sentence” for bundled payment. However, the demonstration clearly shows that bundled payment is difficult to implement.