Learning Systems at Scale: Where Policy Meets Practice

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandates that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) test new models of health care payment and service delivery and provides a path for expansion if the models reduce cost or hold cost neutral while improving quality of care.¹ In developing the initial cycle of models, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) established a systematic improvement framework to understand change across a mix of health systems and increase the likelihood of successful tests of change in payment policy and delivery of care, referred to here as a Learning System.