Dr Rob Fields Discusses How the Proposed MSSP Changes Impact Decisions Around ACOs

Rob Fields, MD, assistant profession, family medicine and community health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and senior vice president, chief medical officer, population health at Mount Sinai Health System, discusses how Mount Sinai’s accountable care organizations (ACOs) will have to adjust to the proposed CMS Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) changes.

Transcript

Mount Sinai has multiple ACOs. How do you foresee the proposed changes to MSSP potentially affecting the Track 1+ ACO or the other ACOs?

I think for Track 1+ specifically, it actually may not affect us quite as much, because we’re already culturally there in terms of taking risk and how we perceive risk and manage around it. So, I think that’s actually a little easier to get our heads around than, perhaps, our 2 Track 1, no downside risk ACOs, where the scheduling now is off. It’s now compressed in terms of where we were thinking we need to go in terms of risk and how much risk we were planning on taking. So, I think it’s affected them a little bit more.

But it certainly impacts our decisions about timing, because we are growing through a growth phase as a system now, we acquired a new system, they have their own ACO, it has changed so much of our strategy of do we combine our operations, do we combined tax IDs as we’re combining systems or not and when do we do that? All of those things have come into play as a result.