Providers seek vendor help with ACOs

By: Mike Miliard

As health organizations begin to feel their way toward accountable care models, a new report from KLAS explores how providers and vendors are putting the pieces together, finding varying levels of confidence in IT solutions' integration ability.

 For the new report, titled "Accountable Care: Providers Forge the ACO Trail," KLAS interviewed 197 providers at 187 organizations to get a picture of how they're approaching accountable care – and how health IT tools are helping (or hindering) their efforts.

The accountable care organization (ACO) is a care delivery model where groups of healthcare providers take collective responsibility for managing patients' long-term continuum of care. ACOs that cut care costs without missing quality targets receive a portion of the savings.

While only a third of providers surveyed by KLAS plan to pursue a formal Medicare ACO designation, the majority agree that accountable care is the way of the future.

"Accountable care will touch every aspect of an organization," said Jason Hess, author of the report. "Its changes have the potential of turning the healthcare world upside down – from patient care to administration to revenue cycle management to IT infrastructure. The internal challenges appear endless. Unfortunately, planning an ACO is further complicated by the fact that the final government rules have not yet been published."

There are no one-stop shops for providers' ACO IT needs, says Hess, especially since each ACO will be different. Many providers are looking to leverage a combination of technology solutions to fill in the gaps and meet ACO requirements. That said, providers see some vendors are more prepared than others – with the most integrated rising to the top.

Top-tier healthcare vendors Cerner and Epic currently lead the way in provider confidence as being most ACO-ready, according to the KLAS report. Despite a few integration and offering gaps, Cerner has already integrated many of the IT pieces needed to complete an ACO puzzle and is taking a proactive approach to working with individual needs of interested providers.

Epic is also perceived as being close to ACO-ready, the survey finds, with gaps found primarily in their analytic capabilities and their ability to share data with non-Epic systems.

The KLAS report also examines provider perceptions of ACO readiness for Allscripts (Eclipsys), CPSI, GE Healthcare, McKesson, MEDITECH, QuadraMed and Siemens.

"Providers describe a variety of planned HIT purchases for their ACO projects - including data warehousing and analytics, HIE and patient portals," said Hess. "Vendors whose offerings integrate best with providers' in-house systems will top the selection lists going forward."

To learn more about this report, visit KLASresearch.com/reports.