The Health Care Transformation Task Force, a 28-member group of providers, payers, policy groups and other partners committed to shifting 75 percent of their business to value-based payment arrangements by 2020, kicked off its initiative with a list of principles to help guide accountable care organization improvements.
The following nine principles for improvement for commercial, Medicare and Medicaid ACOs center around patient choice and attribution, quality measurement and financial stability.
1. Identify the patient population and give patients the opportunity to confirm attribution to their ACOs.
2. Measure quality outcomes for payment, consumer engagement and public accountability.
3. Align the organization's approach to measuring outcomes across payment, engagement and accountability.
4. Measure to reward both improvement over historical performance and achievement based on industry standards.
5. Incentivize ACOs to help develop and refine new quality metrics.
6. Simplify the organization's financial model so all providers are able to participate. Do this by offering providers two financial models: one based on historical claims and the other based on community ratings and health status.
7. Pursue alternative payment systems such as bundled payments, prepayment and capitation, and provide patients with the information resources so they can seek care at high-value sites.
8. Continue to improve the reliability and comparability of data sets.
9. Financially incentivize ACOs to move to two-sided risk more quickly.
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