ACOsAPP ReportingData AggregationData Best PracticesValue-Based Health Care
July 31, 2024

5 Ways Your ACO Should Leverage Data for Cost Control

In creating your strategies for cost control, your ACO must consider how to reduce Total Per Capita Cost (TPCC) while ensuring the financial survival of your ACO and participating providers. This balancing act is the dilemma facing all providers adopting Value-Based Care: how to achieve more savings while replacing revenue lost from services. Here’s how data can guide your efforts to sustain your ACO while stewarding high quality and affordable care: Total Cost of Care Is a False Starting Point If you are looking at Total Cost of Care (TCOC) or TPCC as your primary metric for cost control, you’re…
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ACOsAdvanced Alternative Payment ModelsAPP ReportingCMS RulesMerit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS)MIPS Value Pathways
July 16, 2024

CMS Presses for Accountable Care, Better Quality Measurement for Physicians and ACOs in New Proposed Rule

July brings us baseball, fireworks, and CMS’s Proposed Rules. In 2,248 pages of proposals, CMS has outlined its plans for MIPS, ACOs, and other Advanced Alternate Payment Models, and how they will transition from fee-for-service into a value-based care arrangement through the Quality Payment Program (QPP). We already know from the 2024 Final Rule that CMS plans to phase out Traditional MIPS in favor of MIPS Value Pathways (MVPs), and is committed to having all Traditional Medicare beneficiaries in an accountable care relationship by 2030. These Proposals continue to build on that framework, but it wouldn’t be a July ballgame…
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APP Reporting, APP Measures, health care cost savings
ACOsAPP ReportingData Best PracticesValue-Based Health Care
March 4, 2024

3 Ways Your ACO Can Convert APP Reporting Data into Higher Savings

Controlling costs is a key Value-Based Care goal, a fact well-known to ACOs that share savings with CMS. Even as individual ACOs have generated tens of millions of dollars in savings, however, MSSP ACOs as a whole have only been able to reduce their Total Cost of Care (TCOC) by a fraction. That is a program vulnerability and one reason why value-based payments are increasingly incorporating population-based payment. Plainly stated, claims data (especially 2-5 months old) isn’t a great tool for identifying patient risks, Medicare HCCs notwithstanding. The timeline for cost prevention is before events occur, not when you’re looking…
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ACOsAPP ReportingCMS RulesMedicareValue-Based Health Care
December 12, 2023

How Your ACO Can Optimize APP Reporting Using Medicare CQMs

ACOs just gained a reprieve from implementing all-patient APP quality reporting in 2024. A provision in CMS’s Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule, which goes into effect on January 1, 2024, enables ACOs to report on Medicare patients only, based on CMS provision of eligible patient lists for three APP measures. If your ACO decides to delay aggregation of practice data for now, you need to consider how to optimize APP Reporting of Medicare CQMs. Choose a qualified registry for APP Reporting that can reduce your workload for reporting Medicare CQM Measures. Using CMS’s list of patients eligible for measures will…
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