What to Expect
A mandatory bundled payment model is arriving for orthopedic care, and under CJR-X, hospitals and health systems will be accountable for the total cost and quality of each episode — whether or not they are prepared.
Programs that misjudge their readiness risk absorbing the cost of avoidable variation, missed quality metrics, and gaps they cannot see until performance data arrives. The original CJR model already showed how quickly episode costs add up, and CJR-X raises the stakes.
In this roundtable discussion brought to you by Becker's Hospital Review and Force Therapeutics, leaders from the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons (AAHKS) Advocacy Committee break down the requirements, the financial and quality metrics that matter the most, the risks facing hospitals, surgeons, and ASCs, and the critical learnings gained through the CJR experience to reduce costs and improve quality.
Learnings include:
- The CJR-X requirements, including the quality and financial metrics that directly impact performance
- The largest drivers of variation and episode costs, with insights from the original CJR model
- How the orthopedic community is reacting to this model
- How leading orthopedic programs use patient engagement, data collection, standardization and process improvement to reduce costs while improving quality
Who Should Listen In
Whether your organization is years into bundled payments or facing its first mandatory model, CJR-X will reshape how you manage cost, quality, and risk across the 90-day joint replacement episode. This roundtable brings together two practicing orthopedic surgeons and AAHKS advocacy leaders to unpack what's actually at stake—and what will separate winners from strugglers. In this discussion, there is something for everyone:
- Hospital and Health System Administrators - Understand where financial risk really concentrates under CJR-X, how regional benchmarking and risk adjustment will affect your target price, and why "getting on board now" while penalties are low beats waiting for a v2 with far more exposure.
- Orthopedic Surgeons - Hear directly from two practicing joint replacement surgeons on how CJR-X affects surgical autonomy, gain-sharing arrangements, and site-of-service decisions, and why surgeons, who drive most of the outcomes, are central to whether a hospital succeeds in the bundle.
- Leaders and Directors of Orthopedic Service Lines - Learn how the strongest programs align surgeons and administration early, standardize care in the name of outcomes rather than gaming the bundle, and rethink hip fracture and trauma cases that can quietly upend your performance.
- Directors of Quality and Quality Improvement - See why exceptional, low-cost care still falls short without the right PROMs infrastructure, how the composite quality score and reporting thresholds actually work, and where the biggest compliance risks hide.
- Population Health and Value-Based Care Leaders - Learn how CJR-X fits into CMS's broader push toward full financial and quality accountability by 2030, how it stacks against TEAM and prior bundles, and how to build durable value-based care capabilities rather than one-off, program-specific fixes.
- Clinical Navigators and Care Coordinators - Discover how leading programs shift work to the preoperative period, set patient expectations around post-acute care before surgery, and reduce reliance on skilled nursing and home health without compromising recovery.
- IT and Data Teams - Find out what it takes to collect paired pre- and post-op PROMs at the scale CMS requires, and why underestimating the staffing and systems lift is one of the most common—and costly—mistakes hospitals make.
Access today to learn how to prepare for CJR-X with a clear-eyed view of the cost, quality, and operational demands ahead, and the strategies leading programs are using to stay in front of them.
