The Integrated Healthcare Association has released a timely and insightful White Paper titled ‘Accountable Care Organizations in California: Lessons for the National Debate on Delivery System Reform‘.
California has 285 physician organizations with many of the characteristics described in the national debate, and its experiences with these organizations over the past thirty years, both positive and negative, offer insight into the challenges that Federal policymakers will face with ACO implementation. This paper outlines five overarching aspects of California physician organizations – their organizational structures, payment methods, relationship with health plans, how they promote consumer choice, and the public policy and regulatory constraints they face – and offers ten key lessons for the national ACO debate.
The ten lessons derived from the five key features and described in detail in the report are:
1. A variety of organizational structures are effective at delivering high quality coordinated care; at least as important to success as structure are an organization’s capabilities, culture, and infrastructure, as well as the alignment of goals between the organization and its individual physicians.
2. In California, a range of relationships exist between physician organizations and hospitals. Alignment of incentives between physician organizations and hospitals offer important opportunities for performance improvements across the entire continuum of care.
3. As a method of payment, capitation can be effective at encouraging coordinated care, but payment methods should vary across ACOs depending on an organization’s ability to assume risk. Fee-for-service payment with shared savings has not proven a successful incentive for the efficient delivery of care.
4. Health plans acting in concert on payment methods and performance measurement helped facilitate the growth of California’s provider organizations, and should also play an integral part in fostering ACO development nationally.
5. ACOs are not a panacea for health care spending control. Some large provider organizations have gained bargaining power and raised prices. Capitation payment and consumer cost sharing partially offset tendencies toward raising prices.
6. ACOs must be agnostic to insurance type; most provider organizations in California have focused on commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid HMO plans for their patients, but for ACOs to be viable across the country, mechanisms must be found to encourage PPO and traditional Medicare and Medicaid patients to use their services.
7. Balancing patient choice with the desire to decrease costs and effectively coordinate care is difficult. California’s experience underscores the challenge of promoting care coordination in an environment of unrestricted provider choice.
8. Regulation of the financial solvency of provider organizations is important to ensure market stability.
9. Consumer protections from capitated provider organizations need to be balanced, not overburdening.
10. Special attention must be given to establishing ACOs in geographic areas with identifiable social and economic challenges. Some California ACOs have been very successful at managing care for Medicaid patients, despite low payment rates from the state.
The report was funded by IHA and co-authored by James C. Robinson and Emma L. Dolan, a graduate student in public health and public Policy at UC Berkeley. The complete report is available at www.iha.org.
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