University Hospitals and Summa Health System in Ohio, and Fairview Health Services in Minnesota are among 19 members of an accountable care organization collaborative launched today by healthcare alliance Premier Inc.
The “implementation” collaborative to which these hospitals belong is one of two being started by Premier, a hospital-owned company in Charlotte, North Carolina, that until now has functioned mostly as a purchasing group for hospital supplies and consultant on quality improvement.
Premier is trying to get its 2,300 member hospitals together to share information about the quality and cost of patient care so they can create successful accountable care organizations (ACOs) by 2012. That’s when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will start awarding Medicare contracts to these organizations.
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The “accountable care organization” is a construct of healthcare reform and is aimed at paying healthcare providers in ways that encourage them to work together to lower costs and raise care quality, according to Jason Shafrin, an economist and research associate at Acumen LLC who blogs as the Healthcare Economist.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, included the organizations in his proposed reform legislation last year. “I applaud the Premier alliance and its member health systems for their collaborative work to improve their patients’ care and reduce costs by offering patients access to a wide range of healthcare providers and settings,” Baucus said in Premier’s press release about its collaboratives.
“Accountable care organizations like those in the Premier alliance put the new and innovative ideas in the healthcare reform law into practice to improve healthcare quality while reducing inefficient and wasteful spending,” said Baucus, who also attended a media teleconference on the Premier announcement today.
The organizations would be a departure from the current fee-for-service model, which some say, encourages providers to do more procedures rather than the procedures that lead to the best and most cost-effective care.
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In addition, accountable care organizations take accountability for patient care out of the hands of insurers and put it in the hands of care providers, who are either paid for increasing care quality or share in its cost savings.
A typical Medicare ACO would include a hospital, primary care physicians, specialists and potentially other medical professionals, according to the American Medical Association. Members of the organizations would coordinate care for their shared Medicare patients with the goal of meeting quality benchmarks. However, there are several types of potential ACOs, according to a table posted by economist Shafrin.
About 100 representatives from the 19 member hospitals are attending a Premier event in Washington, D.C., today to start figuring out what kind of organizations they want to have, said Alven Weil, senior public relations and communications manager for Premier. Eventually, collaborative members will share best practices so they can share in the savings generated by those practices, Weil said.
Sharing information also should lead to increases in the quality of care, said Janice Guhl, media relations director at University Hospitals in Cleveland.
