Monitoring the birth of an industry
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH Some eight plus years in, ACOs are still earning their ‘shared savings‘ industry ‘sea-legs’. While they remain a central actor of transformation from volume to value birthed by the ACA for both the public (Medicare and Medicaid) and private (commercial health plans) sectors, the results are continuing to build. The …
Continue reading “CMS Announces 2019 Shared Savings Results”
By Fred Goldstein, MS and Gregg Masters, MPH This past year has seen major changes to the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) that launched the huge growth in Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) a principal workhorse in the transformational copy of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It seems that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services …
Continue reading “ACOs and Value Based Care: The Best of Times Or The Worst of Times? It Depends!”
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH Many have suggested ACOs would not make a dent in restraining the growth of the U.S. healthcare spend, nor have a meaningful impact on elevating the quality of care provided to covered members or beneficiaries (patients). From ‘HMO-lite‘ criticism to a range of ‘tepid’ to no patient channeling mechanisms, recent …
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH First in a series of lessons NOT learned tweets to be enhanced and re-posted to @ACOwatch. In the 80s Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Kenneth Abramowitz predicted for-profit hospital systems would dominate the market by 2000. One of the strategy ‘diversification arrows‘ in the quiver of hospital system executives was to enter the …
Continue reading “On Lessons NOT Learned from Managed Healthcare v1.0 and Beyond”
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH It may come to a surprise for some that ‘healthcare innovation‘ has been in play for quite some time albeit not fueled by a culture of hacking or disrupting legacy operations principally via technology. Unfortunately a veritable acronym soup of mostly failed initiatives under varying degrees of public, private partnership …
Continue reading “From HMOs and PPOs to ACOs and DPCs: What’s Next?”
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH Recently the accountable care industry’s leading ‘skin in the game‘ PPMC 2.0 aka ‘ACOcor‘ equivalent (think PhyCor, MedPartners, FPA Medical, et al) of our time – though Aledade’s model is anything like the pyramid scheme of the PPMC (physician practice management companies) of the 1990s, reviewed the Center for Medicare and Medicaid …
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH Amidst the aggressive assault on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) via an unrelenting but unsuccessful ‘repeal and replace‘ agenda, much conversation and debate in the health reform theater since Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States has witnessed considerable speculation about the probable directional vector(s) of reform. …
Continue reading “National ACO Association Weighs In On Sector Performance”
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH For those of you not on twitter and not following the former National Coordinator for HealthIT and now co-founder and CEO of ACO ‘Management Company’ Aledade, Farzad Mostashari, MD, I’m pasting his rich thread on ACOs and the prospects for its near term future as a tool in the healthcare …
Continue reading “On ACOs and their ‘Stealth’ Upside via @Farzad_MD CEO @AledadeACO”
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH It’s been a while since my last post. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer. In California we’re dealing with very serious wildfire threat. Please hold space in your thoughts and prayers for all of those in harms way – especially the first responders putting their lives on the line …
Continue reading “Founder and CEO of ACO Management Company Weighs in on Regulatory Uncertainty”
by Gregg A. Masters, MPH I came across this piece on the Healthcare Blog penned by Kip Sullivan, Esq, critiquing this article posted in Health Affairs last May ‘Bending The Spending Curve By Altering Care Delivery Patterns: The Role Of Care Management Within A Pioneer ACO‘. Sullivan raises valid points as the the legitimacy of …
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