All ACOs, regardless of payment model, are built on a vision of primary care services to patients. Medicare attributes patients to your ACO based on the plurality of primary care services. CMS attributes a patient to a participating specialist only if the patient has not seen a primary care physician in the ACO or at […]
Cost Savings Aren’t the Only Objective for ACOs: Growth Matters, Too
Keeping within expenditure limits is a top priority for most ACOs for Medicare. That makes sense. Savings are the main distinguishing feature of an ACO arrangement, as opposed to straight Fee-for-Service reimbursement. ACOs that accept downside risk can’t afford to exceed the expenditure target. It’s in their best interest to create initiatives to cut costs […]
Five Ways to Manage Specialty Costs Without Bundled Payments
When health plans and Medicare propose controlling the cost of specialty care, expect that bundled payments will be the next suggested solution. With the introduction of every new specialty-focused payment model, an episode-based bundled payment model is involved. But let’s say you’re an ACO with no interest in bundled payments arrangements. You may not even […]
Straight Talk for Providers Adopting Capitation: Don’t Fly Blind Without the Right Data
Value-Based Reimbursement—once focused on incentives and shared savings—now more often means capitation. Whether adopting Medicare Alternative Payment Models (APMs) or contracting with health plans, physician groups and health systems have signaled greater willingness to adopt these new Risk payment models with their guaranteed payments for attributed patients. But here’s the problem: If you don’t have […]
Episodes Are More Than Payment Models: They’re Key to Improving Care
For many health systems and groups, episodes are esoteric. Providers often think of them only in context of risk-based payment models like bundled payments and capitation. Navigating Value-Based Health Care contracts, providers analyze and model performance under Fee-for-Service and episode-based payments to decide their course of action. Or, if already in Value-Based reimbursement, they use […]
Value-Based Care Defined: Know the Vocabulary of Health Care Reform
Today, as we confront a viral threat that is challenging our health system, its capacity, and how care is financed, it seems appropriate to review some fundamentals. Health care reform has been speeding down a particular track, changing how health care is covered, paid, delivered, and organized. These reforms may seem to be about health […]
ACO Path to Viability: Direct Contracting May Be the Opportunity
What if your best route to viability was the high-risk path you feared the most, because that failure might destroy you? That’s the question Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have been asking this week—whether to participate in Medicare’s new Direct Contracting (DC) initiative. With a shift in payments from Fee for Service (paid per-provider service), to […]
Bottom Line: Can Consumers Survive Value-Based Health Care?
As 2019 nears its close, health care has reached a crossroads. Value-Based Health Care was intended to clarify consumer choices and motivate providers to offer high value services that improved outcomes, as well as to improve patient access to those services. But has that goal been realized? Has anything really changed? Or are health care […]
Can Consumers Ever Get the Transparency Needed to Predict Health Care Costs?
If you’re feeling squeezed to control your medical costs and pressured to find the essential information and help you need to do it, there’s a good reason. Health care professionals, politicians, and economic experts are calling on consumers to make decisions about what services to get and where to get them. While Value-Based Health Care […]
Roji News Roundup: Fall 2019 Edition
In a range of recent industry publications, Roji Health Intelligence CEO Terry Hush shares her insights on the latest moves by CMS and health care trends: Are Value-Based Models Helping or Hindering Care Delivery for Primary Care Providers AJMC Managed Markets Network, October 10, 2019 This article by Jaime Rosenberg summarizes Terry’s presentation at the […]