Allison Silvers Discusses How Innovative Funding Models Can Drive Demand for Palliative Care

Innovative funding models like value-based payments can change providers’ incentives and drive them to seek solutions like palliative care, said Allison Silvers, vice president of payment and policy at the Center to Advance Palliative Care.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How can innovative funding models drive transformation in organization operations?

I think there’s 2 parts to that. The first is innovative funding changes the incentives that providers operate under. Using that example of COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], pulmonologists might be driven to produce certain outcomes and certain costs within a framework that they wouldn’t have otherwise been responsible for. So they’re going to be looking for solutions, and that’s where innovative funding really helps palliative care, because palliative care is an important solution to what they’re trying to achieve.

Innovative funding as value funding—making sure that costs are within targets and making sure that patient experience is within certain, I would think very high, parameters; certain quality metrics are achieved—all of that can be helped with palliative care. So it maybe is even not so much how you pay for the palliative care, but how you pay the treating providers could drive a demand for palliative care integration.