Allison Brennan: Compared With Other Models, ACOs Show Increasingly Positive Results

With a number of difference payment programs being tested, it’s important to have a sophisticated evaluation of these programs to really understand their impact on quality and cost, said Allison Brennan, MPP, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Association of ACOs.

Transcript

How have accountable care organizations (ACOs) compared with other payment models when it comes to improving care and reducing costs?

So, there are definitely a number of payment models out there. One thing that we’ve emphasized with the ACO programs is the need to have a sophisticated evaluation of these programs. So, we need to look beyond just the performance of the ACO relative to their CMS benchmark. And we’ve actually recently put out data that does show significant savings for the MSSP program, similarly CMMI {Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation] has done sophisticated analyses on the first year of the Next Generation ACO model, which also showed significant savings.

As we look at other CMMI programs, it’s really important to use similar types of evaluations as we look across programs. That will allow us to have kind of similar results or comparisons that are on even playing fields. And a lot of these programs are still relatively new, so we need a few years of data before we can really draw conclusions.

But we have seen strong performance in data from ACOs in terms of cost reductions and quality. In some other programs we’ve seen kind of one or the other or sometimes we see improvements in quality and cost kind of neutral, but maybe when we factor in the additional payments to those programs then it’s not a net savings to Medicare. So, I think that overall in comparison to other programs, ACOs are showing increasingly positive results.