Accountable Care Organisations May Curb Costs and Improve Care

 

ACOs could help to coordinate
health care better; © SXC

If implemented successfully, accountable care organizations (ACOs) have the ability to achieve better care, better population health, and lower costs, according to a new report released today by the Commonwealth Fund Commission.

Implementing ACOs effectively will be vital to their success and, to that end, the Commission report also includes 10 recommendations for effective implementation, focusing on the design, payment and functioning of ACOs. An accompanying Commonwealth Fund perspective contains an analysis of how the proposed rules for the new Medicare Shared Savings Program for ACOs issued recently by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) align with these recommendations.

The Affordable Care Act establishes ACOs as a new category of provider within the Medicare program, creating the potential of paying for care in new ways that reward clinicians for improved patient care while reducing health care costs on a broad scale.

Interest in establishing ACOs is also responsive to the public's call for better coordinated health care - in a recent Commonwealth Fund survey nine of 10 people reported that it was important to them to have one place or physician responsible for their primary care, and coordinating care with other providers.

The Commission report, High Performance Accountable Care: Building on Success and Learning From Experience, presents the rationale for ACOs, based on research demonstrating that better organized care systems provide higher quality, lower cost care, and describes several models that might be considered in developing ACOs, including primary care medical home fees, bundled acute case rates and global fees. These models, and variants of them, could be used to move toward a more organized and effective health system.

"The rules set forth by CMS are a needed first step towards implementing ACOs in a way that will encourage accountable care, improve health care quality, and reduce health care costs," said Stuart Guterman, Commonwealth Fund Vice President for Payment and System Reform. "But, in order to achieve the level of success we need, the rules and the implementation process need to enable both CMS and health care providers to operate differently than has been the case in the past."

REHACARE.de; Source: Commonwealth Fund