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Accountable care organizations (ACOs) have become the “de facto” strategy for traditional Medicare. Their incentives for proactive care were designed to improve quality and access to care by aligning incentives among clinicians, hospitals and behavioral health providers.
But a new Health Affairs study found that being enrolled in an ACO was not associated with any measurable improvements in patients’ anxiety or depression. The study’s authors say that this finding is “especially concerning in light of the lower rates of ambulatory mental health treatment in this new ACO enrollee group.”