The following is a guest post by Barry Haitoff, CEO of Medical Management Corporation of America.
For those not familiar with ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations), I want to provide some insight into ACOs and how a medical practice can better prepare themselves for the coming shift in reimbursement, which is epitomized by the ACO. This is a challenging subject since the ACO is a somewhat nebulous idea that’s rapidly changing, but hopefully I can provide you some strategies that will help you be prepared for the coming changes.
You may remember when we talked in a previous post about the Value Based Payment Modifier and its impact on healthcare reimbursement. As we talked about in that post, healthcare reimbursement is changing and CMS is looking to only pay those providers who are providing quality care. As part of this movement, an ACO is an organization that works on behalf of a community of patients to ensure quality care.
The metrics of how they’ll measure what they reimburse and what they consider quality care are likely to rapidly change over the next few years while CMS figures out how to measure this. However, one key to being ready for this shift is that you’ll need to be part of an organization or group of providers that will take accountability for a patient population.
In some areas of the country, the hospitals are leading these organizations, but in other areas groups of physicians are coming together to form an ACO of just physicians. Either way can work. The key is that the members of these groups are going to each share in the reimbursement the group receives for improving the quality of healthcare patients in the community receive.
Also worth noting is that membership in an ACO isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for value based reimbursement. Whether you choose to be a member of an ACO or not, you’re going to be impacted by value based reimbursement and will need to be ready for the change. Not being ready could lead to lower reimbursement for the services you provide.
While it’s great that organizations of doctors are coming together to meet the need for ACOs, much more is going to be needed to do well in an ACO reimbursement world. The reality is that an ACO can’t exist without technology. Don’t even think about trying to meet the ACO requirements without the use of technology. ACOs will base their reimbursement on trackable data that can be aggregated across a community of providers that are likely on hundreds of different systems. Try doing that on paper. It just won’t happen.
In fact, many people probably think that their EHR software will be enough to meet the needs of the ACO as well. I believe this to be a myth. Without a doubt, the EHR will play a major role in the gathering and distribution of the EHR data. However, unless you’re a homogeneous ACO with providers that are all on the same single instance of …read more
