Rio Grande Valley – The Health Care Blog

Why ACO Savings Aren’t About Location.

Oct 8, 2014• 21

By TRAVIS BROOME

One of the big questions since the inception of the Medicare Shared Savings Program has been whether the model would only work in regions with extremely high baseline costs. Farzad’s state-level analysis of earlier MSSP results suggested that ACOs in higher-cost areas were more likely to receive shared savings. It’s one of the questions that Bob Kocher and Farzad received in the wake of the op-ed on Rio Grande Valley Health Providers last week.

So we decided to dig into the data.

We’re still waiting for CMS to make baseline costs for ACOs – and the local areas they serve – public. But in the meantime, we linked each ACO to a Hospital Referral Region using the main ACO address provided by CMS – and took a look at the region’s per capita Medicare costs as a predictor of ACO success.

A Deeper Dive into the Rio Grande Valley

Oct 4, 2014• 8

FARZAD MOSTASHARI, MD

Last week, Dr. Bob Kocher and I took to the pages of the New York Times to detail a health care success story in Southern Texas. In a region once featured for its extreme health care costs and poor health outcomes, a group of physicians motivated by new incentives in the Affordable Care Act has started to change the equation. The Rio Grande Valley ACO Health Providers achieved eye-popping savings in their first year – coming in $20 million below its Medicare baseline and receiving reimbursements totaling over $11 million while also achieving better health outcomes for its patient population.

The savings number made for an impressive headline.

But as is often the case, other information had to be left on the cutting room floor. We dive a little deeper into the RGV ACO below:

The Central Role of Information Technology

Dr. Jose Pena, Chief Medical Director of the Rio Grande Valley ACO, emphasizes that one of the first and most difficult tasks for the newly-formed organization was developing an IT infrastructure that would serve their needs. “Using what was there wasn’t really an option,” says Dr. Pena, “so we built our own infrastructure.”

Forgoing a single EHR solution, the Rio Grande Valley now operates on a mix of cloud and office-based systems. The ACO developed software to identify metrics from various EHR systems, migrate that information to the cloud, and view real-time performance of providers. “IT accounted for 40% of our costs,” says Dr. Pena, “but the importance of proper reporting – to our leadership team, and to CMS – was at the top of our list.” The ACO identifies its customized IT system as foundational to its success.