ACOs are a collection of hospitals, doctors, and other healthcare providers who collaborate voluntarily to provide coordinated and quality care to Medicare patients. When care is coordinated, patients receive quality and timely care. ACOs help minimize duplication of services and mitigate medical errors (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 2019). ACOs have impacted the healthcare system in many ways. First, ACOs ensures that the care provided to patients is of high quality because payment to providers is tied to quality and not volume. Therefore, healthcare providers are incentivized to improve the quality of care they provide. Second, ACOs ensures access to care because it coordinates how care is provided and utilizes health information technology. The coordination of care makes it family and patient-centered.
ACOs has several benefits. One benefit of ACOS is the role it plays in enhancing population health. One objective of ACOs is to improve the health of a specific population for which it is a responsible. This objective is realized by focusing on preventive acre through coordination of services. The other benefit is the role it plays in improving the quality of patient care. Since healthcare providers that take part in ACOs receive incentives for attaining certain standards of care, they emphasize on patient care. Examples of standards that providers must meet include Medicare’s SSP, which contains 33 quality benchmarks that participating members must achieve (Ortiz & Zhang, 2013). Third, ACOs promote patient-centered care because they emphasize on providing care across several settings. These settings include hospitals, primary care providers, and long-term care facilities. Thus, it helps reduce fragmentation. Finally, ACOs promote physician leadership (Cimasi, 2013). ACOs differ from the managed care model because the physicians are the ones to determine how to care for their patients.
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References
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (2019). Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs): General Information . Retrieved from https://innovation.cms.gov/initiatives/ACO on Aug 1, 2019.
Cimasi, R. (2013). Accountable Care Organizations: Value Metrics and Capital Formation . New York: CRC Press.
Ortiz, J., and Zhang, H. (2013). Accountable Care Organizations: Benefits and Barriers as Perceived by Rural Health Clinic Management. Rural Remote Health; 13 (2.
