by Gregg A. Masters, MPH
It might have been prescient but minimally it was perfect timing. While Fred Goldstein, President of Accountable Health, LLC, and me were prepping for our session to re-cap on PopHealth Week (@PopHealthWeek) some of the insights from our deep dive series into Population Health and ACOs, reporting insights from embedded executives at physician led, hospital sponsored and health plan enabled ACOs respectively, CMS yesterday (August 25th) posted the results from their participants in the MSSP and Pioneer Programs.
The Pioneer results are displayed below (for a description of the Pioneer program click here):
Again, while we’re still very early in this game, one bit of ‘cognitive dissonance’ that I experienced is worthy of note and further exploration.
That being the Heritage ACO a physician led enterprise fielded by managed care industry veteran and disruptive innovator Richard Merkin, MD, et al (including my former American Medical International colleague Mark Wagar, President Heritage Medical Systems and most recently CEO Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield) untethered in any way from an institutional portfolio of healthcare infrastructure (i.e., hospitals) booked zero savings for distribution while hospital tethered and a card carrying member of the Association of American Medical Colleges (@AAMCtoday) (as the principal teaching hospital for Einstein College of Medicine) Montefiore ACO booked massive (relative to ‘aligned beneficiares’) savings.
One must ponder the question and ask how can this be so?
It’s common knowledge that ACOs ‘untethered’ from (heads in beds) legacy hospital interests are more nimble and therefore better positioned to manage the volume-to-value transition. Further, when you add into the mix the history of successful risk assumption across a distributed network of ‘aware’ coordinated care practices (both IPA and medical group) you have a material competitive advantage.
So perhaps the ‘devil is in the details‘ as it often is, and the answers are to be found in the formulaic world of risk adjusters, corridors, baselines and severity of illness calculations. We hope top hear direct from Heritage ACO as this author has made that request a number of times previously.
Another interesting result that stands out as it arguably tethers to the presumptively competitively disadvantaged ‘health plan enabled‘ camp of ACOs is the incredible savings generated by the Banner Health Network (a Pioneer ACO), which if memory serves me well is a co-creation of Banner and Aetna via their ‘payor agnostic’ Healthagen subsidiary.
For complete details see the CMS release ‘Medicare ACOs Continue to Improve Quality of Care, Generate Shared Savings‘ and ‘Medicare ACOs Provide Improved Care While Slowing Cost Growth in 2014‘.
Meanwhile for a bit of reading the tea leaves color via Beckers Hospital Review see ‘CMS releases 2014 Medicare ACO quality, financial results: 10 things to know‘):
1. Ninety-seven ACOs qualified to share in savings by meeting quality and cost benchmarks. Together, they earned shared savings payments of more than $422 million.
2. Fifteen of the 20 participating Pioneer ACOs generated a total of $120 million in savings in 2014, their third performance year. This is up 24 percent from the second performance year when they generated $96 million in savings. Of those that generated savings, 11 earned shared savings payments of $82 million.
3. Five Pioneer ACOs generated losses and three owed CMS shared losses of $9 million.
4. Pioneer ACOs increased their average quality scores to 87.2 percent in performance year three from 85.2 percent in performance year 2. They improved an average of 3.6 percent compared to performance year two on 28 of the 33 quality measures and showed significant improvement in medication reconciliation, clinical depression screening and follow-ups, and EHR incentive payment qualification…
Read complete article here.
Yes we do live in interesting times. And ideological prism not-withstanding there is no way this Genie (ACOs et al, and whatever formulaic derivatives may be forthcoming) gets put back in the bottle – the best efforts of Governor Scott Walker’s ‘bold’ The Day One Patient Freedom Plan (more like‘vaporware‘) effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
This train has left the station. Time to deal with it?
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