CMS is inviting physician practices to apply to participate in its new “Million Hearts® Cardiovascular Risk Reduction Model," which will test whether encouraging physician practices to calculate risk for eligible Medicare beneficiaries will prevent the occurrence of first-time heart attacks and strokes. CMS intends to operate the model for five years, and seeks to enroll over 300,000 Medicare beneficiaries and 720 physician practices. Practices selected to participate will be randomized to the intervention group or the control group. Practices randomized to the control group will submit data to CMS at the beginning of the first, second, third and fifth years of the model, and receive a $20 per-beneficiary payment following each successful data transmission. Practices randomized to the intervention group will receive a one-time payment of $10 per-beneficiary to conduct initial risk stratification for eligible beneficiaries in addition to a $10 per-beneficiary-per-month fee for ongoing monitoring of high-risk Medicare beneficiaries. Starting in the second year of the model, the $10 per-beneficiary-per-month fee will gradually be placed at risk based on a practice’s performance managing its high-risk beneficiaries.