Dive Brief:
- A program run by the state of Oregon creating ACOs for Medicaid patients has cut ED visits and grown primary care spending.
- The program creates entities known as coordinated care organizations (CCO), designed to provide comprehensive, coordinated care for Medicaid enrollees. There are 16 CCOs operating today.
- For the first nine months of 2013, compared with baseline data from 2011, ED visits by CCO members fell 13%, admissions for congestive heart failure fell 32%, and admissions for COPD fell by 36%. Admissions for asthma fell 18%.
Dive Insight:
From the evidence to date, it seems clear that spending money on care coordination pays off -- but the experiments to date have not involved particularly large groups of patients. Now it's a matter of getting payers and providers across larger swaths of their covered populations.The pilots have done their job; let's get moving on large-scale projects.