During the pandemic, health care providers and institutions ramped up innovative, sustainable and increasingly digital ways to improve population health outcomes, and I expect this trend to continue. For over 20 years, I’ve advised health care provider teams across the U.S. on leveraging and incorporating digital technology and tools like patient portals, health trackers and…
When I graduated from medical school and took the Hippocratic Oath, I vowed to not just treat the illness on a patient’s medical history form but to treat the person behind the diagnosis. To do this well, clinicians need to understand the whole person and the context in which they live — their race, gender…
One way health systems have tried to improve patient outcomes has been the creation of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), partnerships among care providers that offer a unified combination of services. But what happens when these ACOs aren’t able to provide all the services necessary for a patient’s entire continuum of care? New research by Aravind…
On the heels of several years of declining or flat accountable care organization (ACO) growth in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), 2022 only saw a modest increase in participation, with 483 ACOs partaking. The current numbers do not bode well in terms of meeting the Biden administration’s goal of having every traditional Medicare patient…
Physicians who depend on reimbursement from CMS tangle with value based payment (VBP) systems, a regulatory framework intended to hold providers accountable for healthcare quality and cost. CMS promotes these systems as providing better care for individual patients, better health for populations, and lower costs compared with the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) model. In many ways,…
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that 11 million patients with Medicare will be treated by Shared Savings Program Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) in 2022. According to a news release, the announcement came as part of the agency’s annual summary of the Medicare Shared Saving Program; Medicare’s national ACO program. “With…
A group of eight national healthcare associations this week called on the U.S. Congress to help move the movement around alternative payment models (APMs) forward, noting the sluggish uptake in participation among providers. The eight groups are the American Medical Association (AMA), AMGA (the American Medical Group Association), America’s Physician Groups (APG), the Association of…
A group of eight healthcare organizations, including the American Medical Association (AMA) and National Association of ACOs (NAACOS), have asked Congress to increase their efforts in promoting value-based care and alternative payment model (APM) adoption. In a letter sent to the Senate Committee on Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth, the organizations highlighted…
States are increasingly focusing on health equity, and in particular racial health equity, as a key priority within their Medicaid programs ― often explicitly building health equity requirements into managed care contracts. Ensuring equitable access to high-quality and comprehensive primary care is central to achieving meaningful progress toward this goal. As a result of structural…
For 10 years, the agency that runs Medicare has offered doctors and their practices extra money if they joined groups called Accountable Care Organizations and improved the quality of care they provided to older patients covered by traditional Medicare, while also focusing on the cost of their care. But a new study finds that those…