The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has launched a project to help its innovation unit scale the deployment of effective healthcare payment and service delivery models, establishing the CMS Learning Insights for Action initiative through a new joint contract with Mathematica and Deloitte.
How This CMS Learning Insights for Action Project Came Together
Mathematica first announced the effort in an Aug. 24 press release, saying the agency selected both the firm and Deloitte to jointly support the development of the new four-year Learning Insights for Action initiative for the CMS Innovation Center. “We’ll bring our expertise in data, evidence, and continuous learning to help CMS identify what’s working and put those insights into practice more broadly, supporting more efficient use of resources and stronger program performance,” said Matthew Kehn, director of Mathematica’s program and model operations practice.
The Innovation Center’s Origins and Mission
The CMS Innovation Center was created by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and develops and designs alternative payment models to reduce costs across Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. This statutory foundation gives the Innovation Center broad authority to test new payment approaches, making a dedicated project to study which of those approaches actually work a natural extension of its core mission.
What CMS Says This Learning Insights for Action Project Will Accomplish
In a statement, a CMS spokesperson said the LIA project “represents the expansion of CMS’ ongoing work to leverage model data to identify high-performing participants and study the strategies behind their successes.” This framing positions the project as building on existing agency practices rather than introducing an entirely new analytical approach from scratch.
How Mathematica and Deloitte Will Support This Effort
“Deloitte and Mathematica’s analytics expertise and capabilities will support CMS’ goal to scale these approaches to more models and increase the dissemination and uptake of successful approaches with model participants through targeted learning events, resources, and industry sharing,” the spokesperson said, adding that the four-year contract “will enable CMS to efficiently target resources across models with varying periods of performance and support cross-model learning.”
Why Cross-Model Learning Matters for This CMS Initiative
Given that CMS operates numerous alternative payment models simultaneously, each with different performance periods and target populations, the ability to identify successful strategies in one model and apply lessons across others addresses a structural challenge inherent to running multiple concurrent healthcare demonstration programs.
Why This Contract Signals a Broader Analytical Investment
Pairing two major analytics and consulting firms on a single four-year contract suggests CMS is making a substantial, sustained investment in evidence-based model evaluation, rather than treating this as a one-time assessment of any single payment or delivery model.
What This CMS Learning Insights for Action Contract Means Going Forward
With the four-year contract now underway, CMS will need to demonstrate whether this expanded analytical capacity actually translates into more efficient resource allocation and faster adoption of successful strategies across its portfolio of payment models. Given the project’s explicit focus on dissemination through targeted learning events and industry sharing, healthcare organizations participating in CMS Innovation Center models may begin seeing more structured opportunities to learn from peer participants’ successful approaches over the coming years.
What to Watch Going Forward
As Mathematica and Deloitte begin their work under this four-year contract, industry observers will likely watch which specific CMS payment models receive the earliest attention, and whether the resulting cross-model learning produces measurable improvements in program performance or cost efficiency. Given CMS’s stated goal of scaling successful approaches more broadly, this CMS Learning Insights for Action initiative may offer healthcare providers and payers participating in Innovation Center models a clearer pathway to understanding which strategies are working elsewhere in the federal payment reform landscape.
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