October 14, 2017
By Farzad Mostashari
We started Aledade with the goal of building a new model of primary care – one that’s good for patients, good for doctors and good for our society. In just three years, we have brought this new model to more than 200 practices across 17 states – practices who collectively care for more than a million patients. We have brought it to the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) as well as other payers including Medicaid, Medicare Advantage and commercial health plans.
Our model isn’t easy. It combines both on-the-ground support and a cutting-edge technology platform – one that works with over 60 electronic health records. But it also requires sweat equity – investments of valuable time and effort by our dedicated partner practices and Aledade staff. So, it’s important that we take a close look at how we define success. To us, it’s always been a clear but challenging metric: is what we are doing good for patients, good for doctors, and good for the health system?
For patients, Aledade emphasizes more personal, preventive, and coordinated care – the quality of care that you’d want for your own mother or father. In 2016, both of our ACOs from 2015 improved their quality measures for things like controlling blood pressure and ensuring vaccinations and screenings. Our ACOs, overall, are improving their quality scores, and their patients are taking note. In a recent Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey, Aledade physicians were rated by their patients at an average of 9.3 on a scale of 0 to 10 – above the average for the over 400 MSSP ACOs.
Our practices are doing the right things. They are delivering many more preventive and primary visits, they are reaching out to patients to help them with transitions from hospital to home, they are, for the first time, hiring care coordinators who help those who need extra help. And it works. In every Aledade ACO– not just those that earned shared savings—avoidable emergency room visits dropped, readmissions plummeted, preventable hospitalizations from congestive heart failure, pneumonia, and pulmonary disease fell. Collectively, our ACOs prevented more than 1,500 hospitalizations. Aledade ACO practices are giving their patients better care – and we hear it in their stories, and we see it in the data.
Second, we want to make sure that what we’re doing is good for health care providers. Being part of an ACO has to be valuable, and sustainable, for our partner practices. In a time of increasing consolidation and a health care market that often doesn’t foster real competition, our goal is to help independent primary care practices thrive, and our partner practices succeed in value-based care.
Aledade ACO practices provide more – and more intense – primary care. By conducting more annual wellness visits, helping patients through transitions of care, and implementing chronic care management programs, our practices are seeing a return for their work. By implementing value-based care and practices transformation initiatives, our ACOs redirected health care dollars toward primary care and away from hospitals and emergency care. That is, our practices delivered better care and kept people healthier. The health of their practices did not suffer; in fact, they thrived.
And it’s important to note that they saw these returns in health and the bottom line while also lowering costs for society as a whole. That’s our third target for success.
During the 2016 performance period , Aledade’s ACOs – comprising 142 practices with over 80,000 patients in 11 states (Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia) – saved Medicare more than $9.3 million. Five of our seven ACOs came in under the benchmark set by Medicare, and one was right at benchmark. Two of these – in West Virginia and Florida – exceeded the savings threshold so that Medicare will be sending them a shared savings check. We couldn’t be happier for those practices and the teams that support them, and we’re proud to be their partners.
Proud, but not satisfied.
If not for historically-low rates of inflation nationwide and the idiosyncratic way Medicare measures savings, many more of our ACOs would have earned savings. In Delaware, for example, we reduced costs by a whopping 3.3 percent over last year, and we’re on track to do even better in 2017. In fact, research shows that the savings from ACOs are generally undervalued. ACOs should be rewarded based on whether they improved care and lowered costs more than their local competitors – not a nationwide average. We’ve already proposed some improvements to the way that ACOs are measured.
Medicare also offers a regional inflation update to ACOs in their second three-year contract, which means young ACOs face uncertain market dynamics, but ACOs like many of ours, approaching that second contract, will have more accurate benchmarks. The combination of regional inflation for historical costs and regional benchmarking for this year’s costs reward ACOs that have bent the cost curve persistently in their regions, and have the patience and resources to plan for the long term.
The simple answer is that transforming health care just isn’t a simple thing. It takes a lot of work, a lot of creativity, some patience, and some time. But it works. Studies show that the proportion of ACOs that earn savings nearly doubles from year one to year four. We already have data that our ACOs are performing well in their regions. And with our new partnerships with commercial payers and Medicare Advantage, we’re finding new ways to promote value-based care for independent, primary care practices.
We’re on the right track. Our partner practices are taking the right steps. And the data for 2016 proves it. Despite all you hear about our broken health care system, Aledade practices and our staff are working day in and day out to transform health care in our country so that it delivers better care and lowers costs. That’s why Aledade exists. It’s why we’re so committed to our work. And I’m thrilled to see it’s bearing fruit.