Travis Broome: ACOs Are Being Affected Differently by Pathways to Success Transition

Depending on how ready accountable care organizations (ACOs) are to move to risk probably affects how they view CMS’ decision to transition the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) to Pathways to Success, said Travis Broome, vice president of policy at Aledade.

Transcript

CMS finalized Pathways to Success at the end of 2018; what is the general mood around the latest evolution in MSSP?

Yeah, so the Pathways it basically said we’re going to make the benchmark better, more sustainable for ACOs. I’ve written in AJMC® before about trying to make the MSSP more sustainable over time. So, like, they did that, but they also wanted folks to move to risk a little faster. I think the combination affected ACOs differently.

For us, we’re probably moving to risks faster, because we’ve always intended to go to risk and we have a better benchmark methodology. For other folks who, you know, didn’t want to move to risk or hadn’t already make the decision that risk was in their future, it might have scared them off a little bit.

I think as we get more experience, right, people are literally signing up for the first time, we haven’t had a day of a single ACO in Pathways to Success. So, I think we want people to have experience with it. We’ll see new ACOs joining Pathways to Success when they realize that the finances are a little better and hopefully some of those ACOs that dropped out but really believed in the work and just got a little freaked out by the newness and the changes come back into the program.