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Dive Brief:
- Accountable care organizations in traditional Medicare are prospering, federal regulators said in new data released Monday. However, participation in Medicare’s largest value-based care program has stayed generally the same over the last five years.
- Roughly 13.7 million Medicare patients this year — nearly half of beneficiaries on traditional Medicare — are in accountable care organizations, or ACOs, groups of providers that work together to coordinate patients’ care. That’s a 3% increase from 2023, the CMS said. Similarly, almost 817,000 providers are participating, compared with 700,000 last year.
- Participation in ACOs is important since the organizations have been shown to create better outcomes than non-ACO physician groups, and create savings for Medicare’s trust fund as the program faces rapidly approaching insolvency.