Differentiate between episode-based/bundled payments and global payments.

• A. Episode-based/bundled payments cover a specific clinical episode across settings; global payments cover total care for a patient population over a period.
• B. They are the same concept.
• C. Episode-based payments are hospital-only; global payments are outpatient-only.
• D. Global payments are fixed per patient per episode.

Answer: (A)

The idea here is the scope and time frame of what is being paid for. Episode-based or bundled payments cover all the services needed for a specific clinical episode—like a particular surgery or treatment—for a defined period, and this bundle can span multiple settings (hospital, outpatient, post-acute). The payment is tied to that one episode, encouraging coordination across care teams to keep the episode’s total cost and quality within the bundle.

Global payments, on the other hand, provide a fixed budget to cover the total care for a defined patient population over a longer period of time. This approach looks at overall cost and quality across many conditions and visits, not just a single episode, and it shifts risk to the providers or payers to manage the entire population’s care within that fixed amount.

So the best choice correctly describes episode-based/bundled payments as for a specific clinical episode across settings, and global payments as for total care of a patient population over a period. The other statements either misstate the scope (hospital-only vs outpatient-only) or imply the same concept or a per-episode fix for global payments, which isn’t accurate.