VBP Toolkit: Attribution Principles

Attribution Principles

Payers, purchasers, providers, and patients will adopt the following principles for patient attribution to ensure more effective VBP-based investment in primary care. The intent of these principles is to foster alignment and transparency on methodology, and to ensure VBP outcome metrics accurately reflect a clinic’s patient population.

1. Payers will adopt policies such as lower patient cost sharing, transformation in benefit design, and educational efforts to encourage patient choice of a primary care provider.
2. Payers, providers, and patients will work together to develop and implement strategies to ensure that 1) patients who want to choose their primary care providers can, and 2) this patient choice will be prioritized for attribution, regardless of business line of coverage for those patients.
3. Payers, providers, and patients should work collaboratively to ensure accuracy and agreement about patient attribution. Payers will ensure providers have clear and actionable information about patients assigned to them. Providers will ensure the accuracy of the claims data they submit that support the attribution process. This information should be shared by payers at least quarterly.
4. Payers will use the same approach for attribution as for performance measurement and financial accountability.
5. Payers will prioritize primary care providers and preventive care visits when analyzing claims or encounter data for attribution. Payers may consider other factors such as geographic location, family selection of primary care provider, and past claims.
   
6. Payers will use other claims-based evaluation and management visits if patient input cannot be obtained, and preventive care visits cannot be used and link those visits with primary care provider types. Payers should use at least 24 months of claims-based data, if available.
7. Payers will define which providers would be eligible to take on accountability for patients at the beginning of the performance period and share this information with providers in advance. Identify clearly who can serve as primary care providers (for example, could recommend all providers in recognized PCPCHs).
8. To support payer alignment and ensure accurate attribution — which allows for proper VBPs being made to a provider or clinic — providers agree to work in good faith with payers to ensure billing practices allow providers to submit complete claims data to payers.
9. The Collaborative will consider alignment across payers at level of attribution (clinic vs. individual provider).