Registration is open for the American College of Perioperative Medicine's Interdisciplinary Conference on Orthopedic Value-Based Care.
The conference, which takes place Jan. 18-20, 2019, in Newport Beach, Calif., spans three tracks and includes 38 faculty members who will speak on value-based payments, enhanced recovery after surgery, MACRA, MIPS and the Comprehensive Joint Replacement program. Chaired by Zeev N. Kain, MD, president of ACPM and chancellor professor at UC Irvine Health, the event is designed as an "immersion weekend" to cover the team approach to orthopedic care.
Experts from across the field, including orthopedic surgeons, nurses, physical therapists, anesthesiologists, healthcare executives, patients and futurists will be speaking. The event also includes a day focused on outpatient surgery and ASCs.
"The idea of this conference is to break the silos in the orthopedic space," said Dr. Kain. "This is the third year of the meeting and we have a top-notch speaker agenda who see this as a very important concept. Many are coming in teams of three or more to take advantage of our three parallel tracks: operational, clinical and financial aspects of orthopedics and spine."
Here are three questions with Dr. Kain about the event:
Question: What has changed about the event over the past three years? How has it evolved?
Dr. Zeev Kain: The first year we held the conference, we did not isolate outpatient joint replacements from the general conference. Then, we did a bootcamp on outpatient joint replacement where an orthopedic institute talked about their experience. We also saw a need for value-based care initiatives and fee-for-value, instead of fee-for-service, as providers are moving to the ambulatory world. As a result, we created the dedicated tracks on Friday to focus on ASCs, and the first session talks about moving through the world of value-based payment.
Q: You also have ERAS as a key topic discussed at the upcoming conference. How is that related to the ASC?
ZK: Typically, people have applied ERAS for inpatients and colorectal patients. Now we need to talk about enhanced recovery for ambulatory patients. We will have two labs going on, including a regional anesthesia lab, that will teach people to do procedures in the outpatient setting. We have really tried to cover all the bases and create an environment where clinicians and administrators are there together and can understand each other so they can run their patient operations smoothly.
Q: How do you see value-based care evolving in the orthopedic and spine space?
ZK: People tend to think about bundled payments and fee-for-service as a zero-sum condition. That is a very common misunderstanding. You have to think more about the gray scale from 0 to 10, where we are moving into value-based payments and fee-for-value. If you use those terms, then the fee-for-value is coming in your next contract whether you like it or not.
The government isn't driving this with their bundled payment programs; instead, third-party payers are putting elements of value into their contracts. Now surgeons have to run their practices differently to incorporate elements of value into the contract negotiation conversations. You can't just close your eyes anymore; surgeons need to take a fee-for-value approach.