Given that this Friday is the deadline for applying for CMS ACO “Pioneer” status and is also the assumed release date for the final ACO regulations, this is sure to be a busy week for ACO news.
And as if we needed more proof that still no one knows how ACO adoption is going to shake out, we took note of the following last week: on August 19th, Forbes published a blog post titled “How ObamaCare is Destroying Accountable Care Organizations.” (This was based on a post by noted healthcare policy analyst John Goodman: “Health Care Schizophrenia” )
As a key argument, the post cites how an innovative medical group in Texas called IntegraNet wouldn’t qualify for CMS ACO status, despite all the good work they are doing around measuring practicing evidence-based medicine and driving down costs because they rely on a Fee-for-Service model.
One week later, on August 26th, guess what happens? IntegraNet became one of the first groups in the country to formally apply for ACO designation. (To be completely fair to Goodman and to Forbes, IntegraNet clearly states that they are applying early in order to have some influence on the “burdensome rules” imposed in the regulation).
However this drama plays out, we here at TripleTree have been thinking a bit about the broader picture. While most of the drama and headline news (and criticism!) is happening at the federal level of the CMS ACO program, there are a number of hospitals and physician groups that have quietly undertaken their own shared savings and bundled payments experiments.
In fact, Modern Healthcare published its first survey of accountable care organizations this week, identifying 13 ACOs respondents around the country (this despite the fact that CMS ACO program does not launch until 2012). To us, these experiments are the real market opportunity for ACOs, and one that has finally gotten some deserved attention on the back of the government’s healthcare reform legislation.
In fact, a great example can be seen here in our backyard with Fairview Health System’s developing relationship with the payer Medica. A case study can be found here, but in short: Fairview, a seven-hospital system with 49 clinics and 450 employed physicians, and Medica, with 1.6m members in the upper Midwest, decided that they could seek a more mutually beneficial relationship. In 2009, they entered into a contract that pays Fairview based on the achievement of defined outcomes for quality and total risk-adjusted cost of care based on Fairview’s performance on certain diabetes and vascular care measures. Essentially, if Medica members have better outcomes and lower costs than the community at large, Fairview shares in those savings. Preliminary data is encouraging, though the relationship is requiring a “total cultural transformation” on the hospital system’s part, including a total redesign of workflow, compensation, and responsibilities. (Just think of what kind of transformation will be required to measure and achieve CMS’s 65 proposed quality measurements!)
While these quiet moves will never get the attention that Highmark’s acquisition of West Penn Alleghany that we profiled recently, this the real story of the ACO debate going on right now. These experimental relationships between providers and payers are the ones that will prove if shared savings and bundled payments can truly bend the proverbial cost curve.
Let us know what you think.