Bundled payment care initiative: How this all started

For the past 40 years health care policymakers have attempted to come up with creative ways to deal with uncontrolled medical inflation. Medicare has enacted multiple changes to their reimbursement system and experimented with different payment models. Bundled payments were first implemented for hospital in 1984. Since then experimental models that bundled both hospital and physician payments have been attempted with moderate success. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, CMS was required to pilot a bundled payment model. As a result the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Initiative was announced and piloted at multiple hospitals around the country.