Dive Brief:
- A study released July 23 predicts that more than 130 million Americans will receive care from ACOs by 2017, more than triple the estimated 40 million in 2015.
- A caveat: Parks Associates, the research firm releasing the projected enrollment numbers, is defining ACO "in the broadest sense" to include Medicare ACOs, patient-centered medical homes in the private sector, and healthcare providers accepting pay-for-performance arrangements with private and public payers.
- Under this broad definition, ACOs are expected to generate nearly $1 billion in care management revenues this year, Parks Associates said.
Dive Insight:
According to the firm, the healthcare industry's increasing emphasis on performance-based metrics and payment will boost usage of the ACO business model along with the supporting technologies that aim to improve care outcomes, including data analytics and home monitoring. "Reforms to the healthcare financial model tie compensation to care outcomes, and ACOs, built on the coordinated care model, align well with this new emphasis," said Harry Wang, Parks Associates' director of health and mobile product research.
There is consensus that the momentum for launching ACOs among providers and payers is growing, and that the collaborative model's aim is to deliver cost savings and improve clinical outcomes for a defined population. It is also clear that many businesses want to capitalize on this bustling market.
But when it comes to ACOs, even defining the delivery model outside Medicare is tough. There is significant variation with respect to their scale of operations, risk-sharing capabilities, level of information-technology sophistication, and so on. In the end, this leaves uncertainty as to whether ACOs actually are doing the job well and transforming the U.S. healthcare delivery system—no matter how many millions of Americans are expected to get care from some version of them.