DowncodedCMS Is Running Nineteen Payment Models and Updating Three
The CMS Innovation Center publishes a dated log of everything it posts about its own models, and the catalog promises a weekly refresh. Through nine months of 2026 that file has thirteen rows, the fewest in fifteen years, and ten of them are evaluation or final reports, seven on models that have already stopped. TEAM, the mandatory episode model that has been running since January 1, has not appeared in it since April 2025.
CMS publishes a spreadsheet of everything the Innovation Center has ever announced about its own models. It runs to 1,191 rows, the oldest dated July 2000, and the data catalog says it refreshes weekly.
Through the first nine months of this year it added thirteen.
That is fewer than 2011 managed, the Innovation Center's first full year, and the shape of the decline is not subtle (chart below). The same nine-month window held 122 rows in 2016.
Ten of Thirteen Are Obituaries
Read what the thirteen actually say and the number gets smaller.
Ten are evaluation reports, annual reports, or final reports to Congress: Accountable Health Communities, Making Care Primary, MA VBID, KCC, InCK, ACO REACH, Independence at Home, the opioid treatment demonstration, BPCI Advanced and CJR.
Seven of the ten are on models that have already stopped running.
Three point forward. ASPIRE got an announcement in March, and CJR-X got two, one in April and one on July 31 when the expansion was finalized.
So the Innovation Center's public record of 2026 is ten postmortems and three sentences about models that have not started.
The Sixteen It Didn't Mention
Now cross the log against the roster. The Model Summary Information file, republished yesterday, lists 105 models: 19 Active, 9 Announced, 4 Authorized for Expansion, and the rest finished or withdrawn.
Three of the nineteen active ones have a 2026-dated entry (second chart below). KCC in February, InCK in May, ACO REACH in July.
All three are evaluation reports.
The other sixteen include both mandatory models your claims are already running through.
TEAM is mandatory. It covers lower extremity joint replacement, hip and femur fracture, spinal fusion, CABG and major bowel, it runs through 2030, and it has been live since January 1. Its last row in the update log is dated April 11, 2025, and it says comments on the proposed rule are due June 10.
IOTA is also mandatory, also live, 103 kidney transplant hospitals. Last row: November 26, 2024.
WISeR has exactly one row, the June 2025 announcement, and nothing since. ACCESS has no row at all, under any spelling of its name. Whatever you know about either, you did not get it here.
Where the Model News Went
It went into the payment rules.
CJR-X was not announced into this log in any meaningful sense. It was finalized in CMS-1849-F, the FY 2027 IPPS/LTCH final rule, and the log's own July 31 row is a six-word pointer at it. TEAM was finalized the same way in 2024. The mandatory models now arrive inside the annual payment rule, on its clock and under its comment deadline, and the Innovation Center page you bookmarked is a lagging index of it.
That is a real operational change for anyone who built a model-exposure tracker in 2021.
The channel still exists. It has stopped carrying the thing you were watching it for.
One more tell, and it is small. The roster file says TEAM has 721 participants, and TEAM's own model page says 716.
GUIDE, IOTA and WISeR match across both surfaces. TEAM does not, on the day its first performance year turns three quarters done.
Final Thoughts
None of this changes a rate. A model you are mandated into does not get less mandatory because nobody posted about it, and the five-year performance period runs on the schedule the rule set.
What it changes is where you look. If a quarterly compliance review still has "check the Innovation Center model page" on it, that line found thirteen things this year and ten of them were about models that had already closed.
The rule dockets are where the mandatory models live now, and they publish in August, 892 Federal Register pages at a time, with the rates.
Thanks for reading.