The 5 Clinical Pillars of Value for Total Joint Arthroplasty in a Bundled Payment Paradigm.

BACKGROUND: Our large, urban, tertiary, university-based institution reflects on its 4-year experience with Bundled Payments for Care Improvement. We will describe the importance of 5 clinical pillars that have contributed to the early success of our bundled payment initiative. We are convinced that value-based care delivered through bundled payment initiatives is the best method to optimize patient outcomes while rewarding surgeons and hospitals for adapting to the evolving healthcare reforms.

METHODS: We summarize a number of experiences and lessons learned since the implementation of Bundled Payments for Care Improvement at our institution.

RESULTS: Our experience has led to the development of more refined clinical pathways and coordination of care through evidence-based approaches. We have established that the success of the bundled payment program rests on the following 5 main clinical pillars: (1) optimizing patient selection and comorbidities; (2) optimizing care coordination, patient education, shared decision making, and patient expectations; (3) using a multimodal pain management protocol and minimizing narcotic use to facilitate rapid rehabilitation; (4) optimizing blood management, and standardizing venous thromboembolic disease prophylaxis treatment by risk standardizing patients and minimizing the use of aggressive anticoagulation; and (5) minimizing post-acute facility and resource utilization, and maximizing home resources for patient recovery.

CONCLUSION: From our extensive experience with bundled payment models, we have established 5 clinical pillars of value for bundled payments. Our hope is that these principles will help ease the transition to value-based care for less-experienced healthcare systems.