History of PROMETHEUS Payment®

The development of PROMETHEUS has been supported by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and others.

Primary support for the implementation of the PROMETHEUS Payment model came from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). RWJF provided a planning grant in late 2007 to create and evaluate the model, then additional support to make the model real. With a $6 million grant extending over three years, RJWF enabled HCI3 to implement the program in four pilot sites, two of which are also grantees under the RWJF "Aligning Forces for Quality" program. Development was also made possible by grants from the Commonwealth Fund, the New York State Health Foundation, and the Colorado Health Foundation. We thank them all for their critical support.

The original Design Team included leading experts in health care law, quality measurement, economics, benefits, operations, and related fields. These individuals met every month for over two years to design the PROMETHEUS Payment Model.

• James Bentley, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Strategic Policy Planning, American Hospital Association, Chicago, Illinois
• Francois de Brantes, MS, MBA, Executive Director, HCI3 Douglas Emery, MS, Operations Director, HCI3
• Alice G. Gosfield, Esq., Principal, Alice G. Gosfield and Associates, P.C., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Jim Knutson, Risk Manager and Human Resources Director, Aircraft Gear Corporation, Rockford, Illinois
• Jeffrey Levin-Scherz, MD, MBA, FACP, Chief Medical Officer, Towers-Watson, Boston, Massachusetts
• Elizabeth McGlynn, PhD, Principal, the RAND Corporation, Los Angeles, CA
• Toni Mills, MA, Managing Director, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Chicago, Illinois
• Amita Rastogi, MD, MHA, Medical Director, Cost of Care Programs, HCI3, Chicago, IL
• Meredith Rosenthal, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts
• Craig Schneider, Ph.D., Director of Healthcare Policy, MA Health Data Consortium, Boston, Massachusetts
• Michael Taylor, MHA, Principal, Managed Care Delivery Systems, Towers Perrin, Boston, Massachusetts

The PROMETHEUS Payment model was then more fully developed by the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute (HCI³), which also implemented the model in different communities across the country, and with regional health plans including Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, and Priority Health. In 2011, in collaboration with Brandeis University, HCI³ further developed the analytic software that had been developed to help manage the PROMETHEUS Payment model, as part of a contract for Medicare. That contract was part of a competitive contest to develope the Episode Grouper for Medicare, and the HCI³/Brandeis team won, beating out large multinational companies.

Since then we've continued to refine what is now known as the PROMETHEUS Analytics to serve the needs of a health sector that is moving increasingly faster to value-based payment models.