UnitedHealth Group’s Center for Health Reform & Modernization released a report today, with findings that show potential savings upwards of $3.5 trillion over the next 25 years by expanding the use of coordinated care programs in Medicare and Medicaid.

The report, “U.S. Deficit Reduction: The Medicare and Medicaid Modernization Opportunity,” was provided to the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, established in February 2010 and tasked with building consensus and recommending to Congress a new fiscal path for the U.S. Their recommendations are due in December. I encourage the commission to examine, as UnitedHealth’s study does, current Medicare and Medicaid structures, such as the fee-for-service model, which are costly and ineffective, and consider a large-scale adaption of care coordination models.

Increased care coordination will lead to better prevention and management of chronic disease, the number one driver of health care costs, accounting for 86 and 99 percent of total cost in Medicaid and Medicare, respectively. Federal spending in 2008 in Medicare and Medicaid on patients with one or more chronic condition was $568.4 billion. Within Medicare alone, just three obesity-associated chronic conditions—diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol—accounted for more than 16 percent of the rise in spending between 1987 and 2006.

Community health teams—an innovative form of a medical home—are an extremely effective and scalable care coordination model that provide seniors (and other patients) with a holistic, team-based, approach to their health. Key evidence-based components include medication management adherence and reconciliation, evidence-based transitional care programs, care coordination and coaching, and the ability to link with and refer to effective community-based interventions and real-time evaluation and information on clinical markers with feedback. For more information on CHT, see here.

As a long time advocate for increased care coordination in Medicare, I fully support all efforts in expanding care coordination, including providing coordinated care for Medicaid-eligible patients, expanding the use of coordinated care for dual-eligible Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries and providing seniors in traditional Medicare with value-added, comprehensive care management services, as recommended by the new study. While we’ve already begun to realize some of the cost-savings in Medicare via the implementation of several PPACA provisions in line with these recommendations, there is room for continued improvement, as evidenced by this new data.