A survey from the eHealth Initiative shows ACOs have made little HIT progress in the last year. By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Medicare ACO execs share experiences, advice regarding MSSP. By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Our population is becoming more mobile on a daily basis, and healthcare professionals are no exception. In fact, the very nature of the healthcare industry makes it ripe for a move to mobile. It also presents special implementation challenges.
The movement to enhance and streamline healthcare through accountable care organizations (ACOs) is well underway in the wake of the issuance of final rules by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in October 2011. Designed as patient-centered initiatives that help doctors, hospitals and other healthcare organizations better coordinate patient care, ACOs are fundamentally structured to incentivize participating healthcare groups for achieving an aggressive set of cost and quality measures built upon improved communication, data sharing and decision making.
Many industry leaders championed a free market approach to healthcare during the 12th Annual World Health Care Congress last week. Here are a few key reasons why I don’t think this model is “the fix” our industry so desperately needs.
An Accountable Care Organization (ACO) utilizes a payment and care delivery system that bases payments to providers on quality metrics and seeks to reduce the total cost of care for a certain population of patients. ACOs use a range of payment models and consist of groups of coordinated healthcare providers that provide care to groups of patients. ACOs are accountable to a third-party payer and the group of patients for the appropriateness, quality, and efficiency of the health services they provide.
In 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) set forth initial guidelines for ACOs to be created under the Medicare Shared Savings Program. These guidelines contained all necessary steps required for a physician, health care provider, or hospital to voluntarily participate in ACOs.
The quality measures used to evaluate an ACO's performance as defined by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) fall into five domains. These domains are patient/caregiver experience, care coordination, patient safety, preventative health, and at-risk population/frail elderly health.
The three stakeholders in an ACO are the providers, payers, and patients. Providers are a network of hospitals, physicians, and other healthcare professionals. The primary payer is the federal government, Medicare, but also includes other payers such as private insurances or employee-purchased insurance. The patient population of an ACO will primarily consist of Medicare beneficiaries, but in larger ACOs can also include those who are homeless and uninsured.
According to a new report, a lack of out-of-network interoperability is the biggest obstacle facing ACOs today. By Katie Wike, contributing writer
