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This article is the latest in the Health Affairs Forefront series, Accountable Care for Population Health, featuring analysis and discussion of how to understand, design, support, and measure patient-centered, cost-efficient care under the umbrella of accountable care. Additional articles will be published throughout 2024. Readers are encouraged to review the Call for Submissionsfor this series. We are grateful to Arnold Ventures for their support of this work.
The Center for Medicare and Medicare Innovation (Innovation Center) continues to prioritize health equity as a key pillar of its accountable care strategy. One component of this strategy is testing new model design components in the Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health (ACO REACH) Model, which redesigned the Global Professional and Direct Contracting Model beginning in Performance Year (PY) 2023. Key redesign features are new equity-focused elements, including the novel Health Equity Benchmark Adjustment (HEBA), Health Equity Plan (HEP), and the Health Equity Data Reporting (HEDR) requirements for collection of sociodemographic and health-related social needs (HRSNs) data.