The low back pain cohort enters individual accountability in 2027 with almost no history on the measures it will carry.
We analyzed the most recent CMS Quality Payment Program data for the 37,825 clinicians in the 6 specialties that make up the Ambulatory Specialty Model's low back pain cohort: anesthesiology, interventional pain management, neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, pain management, and physical medicine and rehabilitation.

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CMS has already given us the closest available preview of individual heart failure performance. The distribution isn't reassuring.
We analyzed the most recent CMS Quality Payment Program data for all 11,424 general cardiologists, the population the Ambulatory Specialty Model's heart failure cohort draws from. Only 32 of them reported Q377, Functional Status Assessments for Heart Failure, in 2024. Just 273 clinicians reported it across every specialty in American medicine.

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What the CY2027 Proposed Rule changes about the Ambulatory Specialty Model, and what it still leaves unresolved

On Jan. 1, 2027, selected specialists will begin participating in a mandatory CMS payment model with two-sided financial risk. Yet many organizations still don't know whether the model applies to them.
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The Future of Value-Based Care
A new ten-year experiment called ACCESS is about to test exactly that question — and it could reshape how chronic illness is cared for in America.
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Topics:
VBC,
Value-Based Care,
Conference,
APG,
healthcare,
ACCESS
For roughly a decade, the operating assumption of value-based care has been that you transform outcomes and costs by transforming primary care:
• Attribute the patient to a PCP
• Hand the PCP a panel and a risk arrangement
• Give the care team a gap list
• Let the rest of the system carry on
That model has produced real wins. It’s also produced a generation of risk-bearing organizations that have squeezed most of what they can out of the levers a primary care physician controls and now find themselves staring at the part of the spend they don’t.
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Topics:
CMS,
VBC,
Value-Based Care,
Conference,
APG
For a decade, the question was whether to take risk. Now it's whether your measurement infrastructure can keep up.
About 1,300 medical group executives gathered at AMGA in Las Vegas last month. Most have already committed capital to value-based care. The strategic debate is over. A new one is starting.
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Topics:
CMS,
VBC,
Value-Based Care,
MIPS Reporting,
Conference,
AMGA,
AI
NPPES remains the authoritative source for MIPS, cost attribution, and ACO enrollment today and shouldn't be replaced. The new CMS National Provider Directory (NPD) is a FHIR-based API layer that adds what NPPES can't explicit provider-organization affiliations, near real-time updates, and digital endpoints. For Healthmonix and Prism, the play is to keep NPPES operational while ingesting NPD alongside it, unlocking a "Provider Network Intelligence" layer.
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Topics:
CMS,
NPPES
Jon McNeill, CEO of DVx Ventures and former President of Tesla, opened HIMSS26 with a deceptively simple provocation: automation always comes last. In a conference hall full of people who flew to Las Vegas to talk about AI, his statement landed with force.
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Topics:
ACO,
Quality Performance Category
HIMSS26 made 1 thing unmistakably clear: the center of gravity in U.S. health IT is shifting to FHIR‑native digital quality measures, interoperable data pipelines, and AI tightly embedded into clinical and administrative workflows.
For anyone working in the CMS quality and value‑based care ecosystem, the “nice‑to‑have” era is over. FHIR and digital quality measures (dQMs) are becoming the operating system.
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Topics:
ACO,
Quality Performance Category