Monitoring the birth of an industry
By Karen M. Cheung Regardless of how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the healthcare law, accountable care organizations are moving forward in coordinating patient care, improving quality and cutting costs. With yesterday’s announcement from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 27 providers will be embarking on the Medicare Shared Savings Program, effective …
Continue reading “ACO train has left station SCOTUS decision irrelevant to market innovation?”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH We hear considerable chatter on both sides of the ACO or ‘AC/e’ for accountable care focused enterprise absent the organizational drama of fielding an entity per se with the right structural roots or cultural ‘DNA’. Yet, as someone with principal leadership immersion both setting up and managing the ACO ancestry …
Continue reading “Inside ‘accountable care’, challenges to the ACO”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH From the CMS. Originally posted here. To view the live conference video streaming feed, including accessing the agenda and related conference materials and handouts, click here. Please join the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as we host a three-day conference for State Medicaid agencies, and other Federal and …
Continue reading “Medicaid and HITECH Conference: Fourth Annual”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH The prevailing sentiment towards ACOs in the market today can be grossly divided somewhere between the skeptic camp perhaps most gently represented by the oft quoted ‘unicorn’ attribution, credited to Mark Smith, MD, MBA, President and CEO of the California Healthcare Foundation: The accountable care organization is like a unicorn, …
Continue reading “ACOs: A promising report ‘from the front’ via IOM”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH One of the more popular downsides associated with the growth and dispersion of ACOs in provider [primarily of the ‘institutional variety’ aka hospital/health system] consolidation and asset concentration, is the risk of anti-competitive pricing leverage. You know, the ‘my way or the highway’ approach of certain providers with near or actual …
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Leveraging up from the Integrated Healthcare Association’s (IHA) work (and others) in the bundled payment domain, @Aetna announced yesterday that in association with partner health information technology vendor @McKesson_HIT, their work with Hoag Orthopedic Hospital (aka @HoagOrthopedic) in Newport Beach, California. Bundled payment a child of the DRG payment system and long …
Continue reading “Aetna teams with Hoag Orthopedic on bundled payment initiative”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Some may remember the movie ‘They Shoot Horses’ Don’t They‘ [caution: a rather graphic depiction of an exit]. The plot borrowing from the humane ‘taking them out of their misery’ [post injury] if you will, albeit in the context of certain determined dance partners ‘desperate to win a Depression-era dance marathon and the …
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Advisory Board senior consultant and talented speaker (I might add), recently penned a blog post titled: ‘Bundled Payment: A Stepping Stone for ACO’s? I Don’t Buy It.’ I read this well constructed piece, but came to a rather different conclusion. In his set up Rob posits: As I have previously …
Continue reading “Bundled Payment: A Gateway to Accountable Care?”
By Vince Kuraitis The post originally appeared on the e-caremanagement blog. Last week I wrote about five key differences between formal ACOs (mainly care providers contracting with Medicare) and informal Accountable Care-Like (AC-Like) arrangements between care providers and commercial health plans. Transaction costs Timing Incrementalism Flexibility Capital cost There’s an important 6th difference worth noting: Visibility Formal …
Continue reading “A 6th Difference Between ACOs and “AC-Like” Arrangements”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH The synopsis tweeted is pasted below: Final ‘digital footprint’ for #AMGA12: Reached 66,842 peeps via 273 tweets & an exposure of 638,735 impressions The trade group arguably representing a majority of forward thinking and innovation oriented, in terms of the active exploration of what and how accountable care business models can be articulated, …
Continue reading “AMGA 2012: The complete ‘digital footprint’”
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