Medicare ACOs Indicate savings, quality gains in the year of 2015

Medicare ACOs indicate better quality of care for Medicare beneficiaries while producing financial savings, in accordance to 2015 quality and financial performance data issued on the day of Thursday.

Alternative payment models like ACOs are meant to make better the quality and health results while decreasing the cost of care. Toward those ends, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) declared that more than 400 Medicare ACOs indicate or generated in excess of $466 million in total program savings previous year. That number involves 392 Medicare Shared Savings Program ACOs and twelve Pioneer ACOs.

CMS informed that overall quality scores for 9 out of 12 Pioneer ACOs scored more than 90% in 2015. Additionally, 125 Medicare ACOs qualified for shared savings payments previous year by meeting quality performance standards and their savings threshold.

“The outcomes indicate that more ACOs are sharing savings in the year of 2015, in contrast to the year of 2014, and that ACOs with more experience in the Pioneer ACO Model and the Medicare Shared Savings Program tend to perform better over time,” CMS informed.

Presently, there are more than 470 ACOs that facilitate 8.9 million Medicare beneficiaries. ACOs are “judged on their performance, as well as their betterment, on an array of meaningful metrics that assess the care they deliver,” involving “how highly sufferers rated their doctor, how well clinicians communicated, whether sufferers are screened for high blood pressure and their utilization of EHRs,” claims the August 25 announcement from CMS.

Deployed on a comparison of 2014 and 2015 data, the agency summarized that average quality performance improved over that time by more than 15% on key preventive care measures, involving screening for risk of future falls, depression screening and follow-up, blood pressure screening and follow-up, as well as offering pneumonia vaccinations.

In a proposed press conference, Patrick Conway, MD, CMS acting principal deputy administrator and chief medical officer, stated ACOs are part of the agency’s “broader strategy to make better the healthcare system by paying contributors for what works, unlocking healthcare information, and searching new ways to coordinate and integrate care to make better the quality.”

Although, to unlock the value of healthcare data, these agencies require not merely a strong health IT infrastructure but also the capability to exchange data. However, medicare ACOs indicate important investments in HIT, in accordance to survey results issued in early 2016; they continue to struggle with interoperability issues, making it complex to integrate data from disparate clinical sources.

The survey of sixty-eight Medicare and commercial ACOs by the eHealth Initiative and Premier Inc. discovered that while HIT enables them to accumulate the data they require to deliver quality care and make better the operational efficiency, data integration depicts one of the biggest obstacles to their success.

In the survey, 79% of respondents demonstrated that obtaining information from outside the ACO network was observed as the most formidable challenge facing ACOs, with 64% reporting that data integration was a huge obstacle to developing and operating their ACO.