By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Just released is the continuing pulse of the accountable care industry (not just ACOs per se) via the consulting firm branded with the imprimatur of a former Secretary of HHS Michael Leavitt who opines from the Red State of Utah on the progress made by market driven initiatives outlined in …
Category Archives: ACO
Mark (I’m Not a Doctor but So What) Cuban’s Bold Vision or Big Ego?
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Last week witnessed a rather spirited discussion stimulated by a series of tweets from Billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks (and anointed judge of entrepreneurial insight on CNBC’s ‘Shark Tank‘) Mark Cuban. What’s perhaps most poignant in this energetic public exchange is it comes at a time when ‘health’, ‘healthcare’ …
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The ‘NexGen ACO’: CMS Speaks [again]
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH At one level you have perhaps the most risk savvy and successful operators in the Medicare Advantage space aka ‘CAPG‘ (the California Association of Physician Groups) closely tethered to it’s less geographically constrained though California domiciled partner IHA as in ‘Integrated Healthcare Association’ explicitly advocating for the preservation of the …
Value Based Care: what we can learn from those who succeeded (and failed) in Year 1 of the Medicare Shared Savings Program?
By Randall Williams, MD* “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein If you want to lead your organization to success with value based care, I’d like to help you avoid the mistake of committing organizational insanity. As I’ve written before, all value …
Precision Medicine v. Accountable Care: A Faux Choice?
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Whether you call it personalized medicine or as Eric Topol MD prefer’s ‘individualized medicine’ or even via the possible conflation of the two c/o the President @BarackObama ‘Precision Medicine’s’ initiative (see fact sheet here), it strikes me that we may need an emerging business model glossary to make sure we’re …
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The ACO: Seen One? You’ve Seen One…
A/C/O Accountable/Care/Organization According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) is defined as: …groups of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers, who come together voluntarily to give coordinated high quality care to their Medicare patients. While the goal of such broadly cast and some may say overly …
The Medicare Shared (ACO) Savings Program – A Tale of Transition
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH In pursuit of the no longer optional ‘triple aim‘ and as once suggested by industry innovator Richard Merkin, MD the founder and CEO of Heritage Provider Network, the ‘gold’ in the ACA may be the programs and outreach of the CMMI. But we’re not obsessed with acronym’s in healthcare, right? So …
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Three Days in Scottsdale: Unbundling the Triple Aim?
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH With the simultaneous running of the 6th Annual mHealth Summit (follow #mhealth14), Population Health Alliance [PHA] Forum (follow #PHAforum) and Institute for Healthcare Improvement [IHI] (follow #IHI26Forum) I am reminded of the oft quoted Don Berwick, the then Administrator for CMS channeling from his tenure in healthcare both as a clinician and …
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Vetting the ACA’s Impact on Health Insurance Operators
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH In contrast to the comprehensive ‘go live’ implementation of ‘RomeyCare’ in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the phased (and some would say diluted if not ‘fatally’ compromised) implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been muted via a staggered on-boarding schedule of its various component parts and further selectively waived …
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ACO Alignment Summit
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH Day one of the ACO Alignment Summit kicked off in Alexandria, Virginia with excellent presentations from Diwen Chen, Executive Director, Payment Innovation and Accountable Care, Dignity Health, and Michael Donahue, MBA, Vice President, Network Development and ACO Activities for Eastern Maine Healthcare System (EMHS). Dignity Health a hospital system founded …
