THE ACADEMY
Value-Based Care Academy
Free, self-paced courses on how value-based care actually works: how care is paid for, how it is measured, and how it improves.
Practical, plain-language courses for clinicians, administrators, policy staff, students, and anyone who wants a working understanding of value-based care. Modules within each course build on one another, so starting at the top works best, but each lesson stands on its own.
Introduction to Value-Based Care
A six-module foundation course: what value means, how payment models work, and the measurement, risk adjustment, and population health practices that turn payment reform into better care.
Medicaid and Value-Based Care
How value-based care works in the country's largest coverage program: managed care contracting, state directed payments, Section 1115 waivers, health-related social needs, and how state agencies buy value.
Financial and Actuarial Basics
The money mechanics behind value-based care: PMPM and medical loss ratio, claims reserves and IBNR, how rates and benchmarks are set, stop-loss and risk corridors, and what it takes to bear risk responsibly.
Evaluating Value-Based Care
How to read the evidence critically: counterfactuals and comparison groups, the traps that fool people (regression to the mean, selection, benchmark assumptions), gross versus net savings, and what the CMMI track record actually shows.
Building and Running an ACO
The operator's course: governance and participant alignment, the data and analytics stack, managing attribution, care management and network leakage, quality reporting, benchmark strategy, and what makes an ACO last.
Contracting and Negotiation
How to read and negotiate a value-based contract clause by clause: benchmark and risk terms, attribution, quality gates, data rights, and the reconciliation timeline, plus the negotiation itself and life after signing.
How CMMI Rulemaking Works
A civics course for the value-based care policy process: the statutory authority behind the Innovation Center, how models are designed and announced, the notice-and-comment rulemaking process, how to participate effectively, and how models expand or end.
Data and Analytics for Value-Based Care
The technical course for the people who build the plumbing: claims, clinical, and social data; interoperability and the federal rules; the analytics pipeline; risk models, total-cost and registry analytics; and getting insight into the workflow.
Primary Care Transformation
The delivery-side course for practices: why primary care is the center of value, building the care team, empanelment and panel management, access and proactive care, behavioral health and social needs integration, and the economics of making transformation stick.
Medicare Fundamentals
The program every other course is measured against: who Medicare covers and how it is financed, the administered price systems that pay hospitals and physicians, what beneficiaries actually owe, the quality programs bolted onto fee-for-service, and where traditional Medicare is heading.
Medicare Advantage
The largest risk-bearing arrangement in American healthcare, now covering a majority of Medicare beneficiaries: how plans are paid through bids and rebates, risk adjustment and coding intensity, Star Ratings and the litigation reshaping them, prior authorization and benefits, and what MA actually delivers.
The Employer and Commercial Market
Where 154 million people get coverage and the least has changed: self-funding and what ERISA preempts, how negotiated prices reach two and a half times Medicare, the transparency and fiduciary rules that reopened the market, and what employers can actually do about any of it.
Specialty Care and Episodes
The course for the audience value-based care has served least: how episodes are designed and priced, the mandatory TEAM model now running in selected markets, the oncology and kidney and ambulatory specialty models, how specialists are paid inside population arrangements, and what running an episode program actually requires.
Behavioral Health in Value-Based Care
The area where the standard playbook is most likely to be confidently wrong: why value models miss behavioral health, the collaborative care evidence and how it is paid for, carve-outs and network access, measurement and the parity law, substance use disorder, and what happened when organizations actually took the risk.
Pharmacy Spend in Value-Based Contracts
The fastest-growing line in total cost of care and the one providers control least: the medical and pharmacy benefit split, the concentrated supply chain the FTC documented, what drug spending actually sits inside a benchmark, the levers that work, and the policy changes reshaping all of it.