Future of Accountable Care Organizations
The challenging and changing nature of healthcare industry is leading to the emergence of Accountable Care Organizations or ACOs. An ACO is actually a group comprising of primary care specialists, doctors, hospitals along with associated healthcare providers who work together and have a common aim to deliver coordinated high quality care to the patients. The ACO was created by ACA or Affordable Care Act, based on the vision of creating a health care system, which is more effective as well as connected. In ACOs, accountability for clinical processes as well as patient care coordination are shared by multiple providers. The main aim is to help in the reduction of health care expenses and also for quality improvement of national healthcare.
One of the must-have competencies that is required for the proper formation as well as functioning of ACO is interprofessional team care along with aid management. In the unforeseeable future, it may be assumed that there will be a shortage in the supply of skilled healthcare professionals. With a constrained supply, more effective models of leverage will be required, which will lead to interprofessional team care applications. In fact, it is best to come out with a design of physician compensation, since the financial scenario is such that having plans of salary-based compensations might be a good idea. It is also a good idea to manage the system properly by regularly updating the performance metrics as well as benchmarks along with regular evaluation. Recording the performance in balance sheets is another addition on the to-do list.
From both clinical and operational perspective, ACOs actually make sense. The healthcare organizations these days are often filled with faulty communication habits as well as inefficient workflows, which affects both outcomes as well as quality in a negative way. The issues can be countered by the recognized ACOs, only if they meet some indicators along with derived data of some key areas, like experience of care providers along with patients, care coordination, safety of patients through analysis, reporting along with error prevention and the 'at-risk population' which includes health of elderly as well as physically sick people.
The complex nature of healthcare makes it necessary to approach issues in cohesive groups that work together, so that objectives like expertise sharing, creativity, development of new skills, influencing decisions as well as increase of personal autonomy are achieved. The formation of such teams may be possible only by elimination of barriers that may be encountered in regular communications. For unlocking the quality outcomes as well as team performance, communication excellence is needed. In healthcare, communication must be simple through simple conversation with each other. Any gap in communication may result in limited quality service. If issues are not addressed, it may result in ineffective, inefficient as well as potentially unsafe performance, which might lead to unintended outcomes.
Since healthcare system products are services, to make ACOs really effective as well as the potential future of healthcare, evaluation should be done in respect of parameters like reliability, tangibles, empathy, assurance, communication, accessibility along with clinical measures. When these measures are achieved, then high performance teams can be developed and bonus benefits will be experienced along with job satisfaction.
The diverse nature of ACO is complimentary to the diverse natures of the patients that they serve. Almost half of them are organizations led by physicians, with 20% including critical access hospitals, rural health centers as well as community health centers, which serve rural along with low income communities. Their good work helps ensure that high quality medical services are accessed by normally under-served populations. It is possible by putting extra attention on the patients. Currently, the demand as well as popularity of ACOs are growing steadily. With more than 3 million medicare beneficiaries being served by ACOs, the program may seem to be the future of the healthcare industry. There are plans of launching some additional ACOs in 2014 which will be continued annually. You can build healthcare apps within allocated budgets and time schedules through companies having clinical software development expertise.
We provide healthcare software development services. If you would like to hire healthcare software developers, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.