

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are relying more on physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and other non-physician providers to deliver high-quality, low-cost care to assigned patients, according to a recent CMS study.
Published in the most recent edition of Health Affairs, researchers from CMS and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Medicine found that ACOs increased the average number of non-physician practitioners in the organization from 47 to 245 clinicians between 2013 and 2018, with physician assistants seeing the most growth.
The prevalence of physician assistants averaged less than 1 percent of ACO clinicians during the first four years of the study to more than 13 percent by the last two years, the study showed. Nurse practitioners saw similar growth, with average prevalence increasing from 17.6 percent to 25.0 percent during the period.