Strategic Direction | CMS

CMS Innovation Center 2025 Strategy to Make America Healthy Again

The CMS Innovation Center’s strategic direction focuses on empowering Americans to achieve their health goals and live healthier lives. Building on 15 years of Innovation Center experience and lessons learned, the updated 2025 Innovation Center strategy takes a comprehensive approach to preventive care anchored in our statutory mandate to protect taxpayers.

Vision: To build healthier lives through evidence-based prevention, patient empowerment, and greater choice and competition.

Foundational principle: Protect federal taxpayers in all CMS Innovation Center models and other activities. 

Three-Pronged Approach

The Innovation Center’s vision will be achieved through three interrelated pillars: promote evidence-based prevention, empower people to achieve their health goals, and drive choice and competition. Together, they will support the varying needs of the populations served by the Innovation Center.

Promote evidence-based prevention

Prevention is the cornerstone of healthy living. The Innovation Center will incentivize preventive care and health promotion to help people avoid illness and optimally manage chronic disease.

Current and future models will:

• Embed preventive care in all model designs
• Measure the impacts of preventive care

Future model features will:

• Directly engage with providers and beneficiaries on disease prevention activities, including collaboration with community-based organizations
• Include waivers to incentivize preventive care
• Offer access to evidence-based alternative medicine
• Evaluate for preventive outcomes, such as days at home for frail beneficiaries
   

Empower people to achieve their health goals

The health system is fragmented and hard to navigate. The Innovation Center will use tools, information, and processes that better connect people to their health data and empower them to make informed health decisions alongside the patient–provider relationship.

Current and future models will:

• Unlock data access
• Align financial incentives with health outcomes

Future model features will:

• Increase beneficiary access to information and tools — including mobile-device applications — for disease management and healthy living
• Publish data about providers and services — including cost and quality performance — to support beneficiary decision making
• Issue waivers to support predictable cost-sharing for certain services, drugs, or devices
   

Drive choice and competition

The Innovation Center will have a significant role in promoting competition in health care markets. Models can provide opportunities for independent providers and practices to be rewarded for better care while also promoting patient choice in both coverage and sites of care.

Current and future models will:

• Increase independent provider participation in value-based payment programs
• Promote patient choice in care
• Improve administration of value-based payment programs

Future model features will:

• Expand the use of advanced shared savings and prospective payments to support independent provider practice participation in models
• Reinvest hospital capacity in outpatient and community-based care through changes to certificate of need requirements
• Standardize design features — such as quality measures — to reduce administrative burden

Protecting Federal Taxpayers

Aligned with the foundational principle of protecting federal taxpayers, the Innovation Center will:

• Ensure all model tests are fiscally sound with a pathway to certification
• Prioritize high-value care and services and incentivize reductions of unnecessary utilization
• Require all models to have downside financial risk and require providers to assume some of the financial risk, not just entirely conveners
• Move Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries to accountable care arrangements with providers who assume global downside financial risk
• Reduce the role of state government in rate setting for health care services
• Refine and simplify model benchmarking methodology
• Ensure funds reach those most in need through proper and nondiscriminatory provision of funds for health care services 

More Information

You also can sign up for the CMS Innovation Center Listserv to receive regular email updates from the Innovation Center.

Originally posted on: May 13, 2025