Monitoring the birth of an industry
By Jeff Goldsmith In the ten months since the passage of health reform, health care managers, particularly those in hospitals and health systems, have struggled to make sense of an onslaught of change in Medicare policy. The response has been depressing: an accelerating wave of merger and acquisition activity, both horizontal hospital mergers and an …
Continue reading “Virginia Mason’s Clinical Transformation: Hard Work, Big Payoff”
The brodcast today on ACO Watch: A Mid-Week Review was a, well, d/i/s/a/s/t/e/r: Per Wikipedia: A disaster is a natural or man-made hazard that has come to fruition, resulting in an event of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life, or drastic change to the natural environment. A disaster can be …
Continue reading “An ACO Watch: Mid-Week Review ‘Mea Culpa’!”
By Ron Klar Certainly no Medicare provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has generated more interest among health care providers, policy analysts, and consultants than the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) for accountable care organizations (ACOs). Because there are so many design elements for which the Secretary of Health and Human Services must “determine”, …
Continue reading “The Importance of The Shared-Savings ACO Model”
Mark C. Shields, Pankaj H. Patel, Martin Manning and Lee Sacks in Health Affairs Abstract The Affordable Care Act encourages the formation of accountable care organizations as a new part of Medicare. Pending forthcoming federal regulations, though, it is unclear precisely how these ACOs will be structured. Although large integrated care systems that directly employ …
