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Accountable care organizations have major challenges integrating social services with medical care, including a lack of data on their patients’ social needs and the capabilities of community partners.
That’s the finding of a new study published in the journal Health Affairs, based on qualitative data from 22 ACOs.
“The ACOs in our sample frequently lacked data about several dimensions that could inform decision making and efforts to integrate social services and medical care, a phenomenon we characterize as the ACOs’ ‘flying blind’,” state the study’s authors. “At the most basic level, most ACOs lacked data on their own patients’ social needs.”