Specialty Payment Models

Kidney care remains the only clearly VBC-relevant signal this week: AHIP’s focus on closing kidney care health gaps reinforces payer interest in earlier CKD identification, equity-oriented outreach, and tighter specialty-primary care coordination—core capabilities for ACOs and kidney-focused risk models. The broader specialty-payment signal is that stakeholders are still looking to nephrology as a testbed for condition-specific value-based care, while the cited proteomics developments are scientifically important but not yet directly tied to Medicare/Medicaid payment policy or specialty model design.