Monitoring the birth of an industry
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH One of the more interesting and perhaps developing trends to watch in fledgling accountable care enterprises or ACOs is the blueprint adopted for their chosen pathways towards integration (clinical, economic or legal). Since all healthcare is [hyper] local and, once you’ve seen an ACO, you’ve seen one ACO its vital …
Continue reading “Wag The Dog: Will Subacute Providers Drive Upstream Innovation?”
By Joseph F. Damore and Barbara Gray As finance leaders consider whether to apply to the Medicare Shared Savings Program, they should evaluate the application of accountable care principles to six other markets for value-based contracting. When the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued proposed regulations for Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs), it refocused …
Continue reading “Markets, Metrics, Maturity and ACO Model: 6 Market Types”
Reprinted in portion below: Berwick’s resignation a signal of a faulty political system via Healthcare Finance News by Stephanie Bouchard WASHINGTON – It came as a surprise to no one that Donald Berwick, MD, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, would not be carrying on in the position once his term ended on …
Continue reading “Berwick v. Hatch, Enzi & the Gang of 42. Lunatics 1, America 0”
By Gregg A Masters, MPH The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services via the innovation center will award up to $30 million to innovative public/private partnerships, and will likely favor those ventures with multi-payor breath. Via the ‘We Can’t Wait for Innovation Challenge’, a total of $1 billion is intended to stimulate the creative juices …
Continue reading “CMS Grant Program to Stimulate Public/Private Multi Payor Partnerships”
By Conor Green A few months ago, we noted that the release of regulations for ACOs would trigger an ACO services race across the healthcare landscape, where market participants would be sprinting to create service offerings that would help hospitals and physician practices become compliant with the CMS ACO regulations for sharing financial risk and the …
By Donald Berwick, MD Editors Note: Thanks to a tweet today via @AxSys_Health CMS Administrator Don Berwick, M.D., explains ACO’s in plain language. Hi, I’m Don Berwick, CMS administrator. Today’s a kind of red letter day, October 20th 2011. That’s the day in which we launch the Accountable Care Organization final rule and I just …
Continue reading “Dr. Don Berwick on ACO’s: From Volume to Value”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Deep in the 690+ pages of the document filed with the OFR, is a nifty little matrix that compares key provisions of the ‘notice of proposed rule making’ to the final rule which theoretically incorporated the best and brightest suggestions pro-offered in 1,300+ comments supplied to CMS. That pre/post matrix …
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH A recent report attached to a Tweet posted by Brian Ahier caught my attention in the blitzkreig of ACOs postings this past week. @ahier Building #ACO‘s & OUtcome Based Contracting in the Commercial Market The complete title of the attached report is ‘Building ACOs and Outcome Based Contracting in the Commercial Market: …
Continue reading “ACOs: It’s Not Just About Medicare [shared savings]”
By Gregg A. Masters, MPH Like some of you, I woke up the morning of Friday, October 21st, 2011 to a literal ‘blitzkrieg’ of tweets flooding two TweetDeck columns tagged ‘ACOchat’ and ‘ACO’. Everyone it seems has a dog in the hunt to make known their standing or interest in Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), the …
Continue reading “ACO Final Rule: A Round Up of Early Opinion and ‘Go To’ Resources”
EDITOR’S NOTE! Re: The press release ‘fact sheet’ for the ACO and Medicare Shared Savings Programs provisions as codified in today’s FINAL RULE, is published in it’s entirety below: People with Medicare will be able to benefit from a new program designed to encourage primary care doctors, specialists, hospitals, and other care providers to coordinate …
Continue reading “HHS/CMS ‘Fact Sheets’ Per PR Issued Today on HealthCare.gov”
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