Critical Care Organizations

Creating "turbo" accountable care organizations for time-critical diagnoses.

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are scheduled for implementation in 2012 by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and this “standard” ACO model seeks to encourage hospitals and ambulatory care practitioners to come together as organized entities responsible clinically and financially for the health care of 5000 Medicare beneficiaries.1,2 However, significant barriers to imp...

Accountable Care Organizations and Population Health Organizations.

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) and hospitals are investing in improving "population health," by which they nearly always mean the health of the "population" of patients "attributed" by Medicare, Medicaid, or private health insurers to their organizations. But population health can and should also mean "the health of the entire population in a geographic area." We present arguments for an...

Accountable care organizations.

Accountable care organizations.

Primary Care Clinics and Accountable Care Organizations

BACKGROUND The Accountable Care Organization (ACO) is one of the new models of health care delivery in the U.S. To date, little is known about the characteristics of health care organizations that have joined ACOs. We report on the findings of a survey of primary care clinics, the objective of which was to investigate the opinions of clinic management about participation in ACOs, and the charac...