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Accountable Health Care Organizations

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Submitted By arlenehicks
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Accountable Care Organizations
May 5, 2012

Accountable Care Organizations represent a strategy outlined within the Affordable Health Care Act to control costs and improve quality. They require partnerships between providers, hospitals, and communities. There are challenges in health systems where private practice is the predominant practice structure. Key issues and challenges to an effective ACO are cost reduction and utilization management, business model shifts, risk sharing and population management, consolidation, a changing role of IT and value of data, physician integration, clinical process improvement, and consumerism and the patient. How to reduce cost is a question that has been pursued, and it needs to be looked at, as well as utilization of management. Does this mean that homes for critically ill children or a hospital that cares only for transplant patients is becoming the future of health care in the USA?

Why Accountable Care Organizations? No one will dispute the high cost of health care in the United States. Critics often say that it is the result of how health care providers are paid. They claim that—with a fee for each service— this results in increased and wasteful spending. Critics say that this system rewards providers just for doing more procedures, rather than for providing efficient and high-quality care (Matthews, 2012). In an effort to handle this problem, the United States Government has passed legislation: The Affordable Care Act (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 2012). This act conveys that better health care can be accomplished by creating Accountable-Care Organizations, or ACOs, to be responsible for the health care of a group of people. An Accountable Care Organization (ACO) is a network of doctors and hospitals that shares responsibility for providing care to patients. The ACO is

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