Regarding ACOs: 3.2% of hospitals are in; not many more plan to be.
So finds a Commonwealth Fund study, "Hospitals on the Path to Accountable Care," builds off data from a National Survey of Hospital Readiness for Population-Based Accountable Care, conducted by the Health Research and Educational Trust (HRET) and collected from 1,672 short-term, acute-care hospitals.
The basic findings: Only 3.2% said they were participating in an ACO, and only 9.6% said they were "preparing" to. More than half of the current ACOs were "joint ventures between physicians and hospitals"; a fifth were physician-led, another fifth were hospital-led. Only 2% were payer-led.
Basically, Kaiser Health News calls it: "For Hospitals, The Rush Is Not On To Become An ACO."
Most of the ACOs in the survey were on a shared-savings model -- the one calling for no financial risk. That makes sense, as "hospitals participating or preparing to participate in an ACO expect to see significant decreases in revenue from fee-for-service payment contracts in the next two years," the report says.
To the extent participants expect to make money, they mainly think it will come from "a hybrid of fee-for-service payments plus shared savings," and bundled payments.
Patrick Ouellette of EHR Intelligence shrugs: "There are currently 154 ACOs participating in the Medicare shared savings program that serve a total of 2.4 million patients," he says, "so there must be something that’s currently working with the model."