Providers working on the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Advanced model have additional time to return signed participation agreements and return deliverables to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The new deadline for returning the BPCI Advanced Signed participation agreements and clinical episode selections is August 8, giving participants an additional week. Deliverables to CMS are now due Sept. 14, according to a new model timeline released last week.
BPCI Advanced is the next generation of the bundled payment initiative, which began in 2015. In the advanced scenario, providers can assume more financial risk and include three outpatient clinical episodes.
While hospitals and physicians groups generally dominate BPCI models, skilled nursing facilities are considered critical partners in reducing rehospitalizations and the costs of care. An episode begins with a hospital admission or outpatient procedure and tracks a patient for 90 days.
CMS said it is still planning to announce participants in September, with an October launch date.
The newer model is believed to reflect the delay in the agency distributing data to providers, which reached applicants in June instead of a month earlier. That delay gave applicants less than two months to meet the original August 1 deadline with signed participation agreements.
The next round of BPCI Advanced will be in spring 2019, with another cohort starting Jan. 1, 2020.
