The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation awarded Delaware with a $35 million grant Tuesday to improve health care services in the state.
The award will be used to fund the State Health Care Innovation Plan, which was developed in 2013 by healthcare experts in Delaware. The plan aims to achieve $1 billion in savings by 2020 through improvements including coordination of care across health providers, improving preventative care services and supporting insurance carriers that offer high-quality, cost-efficient care.
Half of those savings will be reinvested into healthcare improvements in the First State.
Bettina Tweardy Riveros, Chair of the Delaware Health Care Commission, says that health outcomes in Delaware rank below the national average in several categories - something she says needs to change.
"We need to have a comprehensive approach and change how we deliver care, have it better coordinated, provide funding through our providers to support them as they already are moving to new ways to deliver care and have payment models that incentivize really terrific outcomes for all Delawareans," said Riveros.
Riveros adds that while Delaware has made many improvements to its healthcare system in recent years, experts devising the Innovation Plan found many areas that need improvement.
"What we really saw was that we still remain relatively unhealthy. Our healthcare quality is generally average or below average, we’re spending 25 percent more per capita than the national average and our payment system really incentivizes volume of services rather than quality," said Riveros "That’s not getting us where we need to be."
Healthcare spending in Delaware averages more than $8 billion per year.
