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4 Ways to Think About ACO Strategy
Where Do I Fit In?
I have now seen half a dozen times the animated YouTube video—you know the one—of the befuddled health care executive trying to figure out what an ACO is. It is played regularly, for comic relief, at board and management meetings. Laugh along, but don't be that guy. You need to decide whether your organization will be an ACO trailblazer or whether you will let others do the early experimentation while you focus on improving your System of CARE (Clinical Alignment and Resource Effectiveness) performance.
Either tack is valid, but be explicit and thoughtful about the strategic logic that leads you down your chosen path. In the final analysis, there is no one "right" way to approach the health care changes to come. Not everyone will, or should become an ACO, but every organization must build high-performance Systems of CARE.
Stephen Jenkins is vice president of SG2, a healthcare information company that provides advanced analytics, business intelligence, education and publications to hospitals and healthcare organizations in the US and around the globe.
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Comments are moderated. Please be patient.
Jennifer Dennard (12/9/2010 at 1:41 PM)
This is a very handy overview of ACO strategies, and certainly reflects much of the sentiment we've heard regarding ACOs in the past year or so. I recently published a 3-part series on ACOs via PorterResearch.com (http://bit.ly/a3X6UB), and in talking with folks for those articles, it seems that most - providers and vendors at least - are at least thinking about it. Some are taking baby steps to initiate it, and others are going full steam ahead, such as Norton Healthcare. But everyone is taking a wait-and-see approach when it comes to the value of the model.