ACO Toolkit
Implementing ACOs across the United States
Author(s): The Dartmouth Institute The Brookings Institution, 2011
Our nation’s health care system is at a critical crossroads; unsustainable growth in health care costs poses a serious threat to our national fiscal integrity, as well as to individual’s and small businesses’ abilities to receive affordable, highquality health care. The current fee-for-service payment system undermines health care providers’ efforts to invest in real clinical transformation, while incentivizing the provision of an ever increasing volume of services. Payers are similarly concerned that current attempts by health care providers to better coordinate care and invest in new health information technology (IT) infrastructure will continue to add to already rapidly growing health care costs.
In an attempt to address this challenge, historic national health care reform legislation was passed in March of 2010. This legislation, among other initiatives, includes the creation of a Medicare Shared Savings program, to be implemented no later than 2012, that allows for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) to participate in Medicare. ACOs are being recognized as a promising new payment model that could successfully start to realign our current payment system to better reward improvements in the efficiency of care delivery by supporting health care providers’ efforts to improve quality and bend the cost curve with the distribution of shared savings.
