Accountable Care Organizations Show Results (02.22.10)
The Massachusetts-based Sisters of Providence Health System has embraced the Accountable Care Organization model and is expanding efforts during 2010. This Accountable Care model, which supports management of the patient, is in line with the Massachusetts Special Commission on the Health Care Payment System's proposal moving away from a fee-for-service payment methodology and toward a "global payment" model that shifts payments toward performance measures and health outcomes. Read the Massachusett's Republican story.
Virginia-based Carilion Clinic has been piloting an Accountable Care Organization, based on the Brookings-Dartmouth ACO Pilot Project. “Accountable Care Organizations are a model for delivery reform that can help transform our nation’s health care system from one that rewards overuse to one that delivers high-quality care at lower costs,” said Mark McClellan, director of the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform and Leonard D. Schaeffer Chair in Health Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. Read about the project at Carilion.
The Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative is a ground-breaking collaboration of professionals improving health care safety and quality in Southwestern Pennsylvania. PRHI was the first regional consortium of medical, business and civic leaders to address healthcare safety and quality improvement as a social and business imperative. Turning its own community into a demonstration lab, PRHI strives to accelerate improvement and set the pace for the nation. Its experiment reflects three principles:
- Health care is local. Federal policy changes alone cannot achieve needed reform.
- Those who work at the point of care develop quality and safety improvements that work and last.
- Continuous improvement in quality and safety requires the highest possible standard, namely perfection. To settle for less limits achievement.
