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In its first three years of operation, Medicaid’s primary care-focused Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) in Massachusetts showed “no clear evidence of success” in improving asthma care for children, according to research led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and UMass Chan Medical School-Baystate Health.
The study, published recently in JAMA Pediatrics, compared the asthma care of Medicaid-insured children affiliated with a Medicaid ACO to that of children with private insurance.
Senior author Dr. Sarah Goff, a practicing pediatrician and internist and professor of health promotion and policy in the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences, says she was “not terribly surprised” at the findings, in part because it was so early in the post-implementation time period, though she had hypothesized there might be some improvements in the outcomes measured.