Accountable Care Organizations Still Play a Vital Role in Value-Based Care
Moving away from accountable care organizations (ACOs) will not lead to value-based care, according to Luke Hansen, M.D., M.H.S., and chief medical officer of Arcadia, a healthcare data analytics company.
Accountable care organizations (ACOs) still play an important role in value-based care, and shifting away from them at this time would be a mistake, according to Luke Hansen, M.D., M.H.S. In a video interview with Managed Healthcare Executive, Hansen explained why ACOs are still important.
Luke Hansen, M.D., M.H.S.
“Bundled programs are a necessary piece,” Hansen said. “The ACO structure can transfer accountability for cost to PCPs [primary care physicians], but at the end of the day, if you play that out and you really start to tighten the screws, I worry we end up back where we were with managed care 1.0, where the PCPs become gatekeepers.”
Hansen went on to explain that thoughtfully transferring risk to organizations is the key to success.
“If we were to just transfer risk, in a thoughtful way, to an organization to get them to think more about a population attribution than clinic visit volume—that's the key component of the program that's needed,” Hansen continued. “Right now, there are still the engines, the machines, of the provider industry attuned to visits, which are inherently reactive. If we could figure out a way to give accountability for populations to these organizations, they could reverse engineer how to get to those people and bring them in appropriately.”
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