NACHC Offers New ACO Toolkit
Our nation’s health care system is at a critical crossroads; unsustainable growth in health care costs poses a serious threat to our national fiscal integrity, as well as to individual’s and small businesses’ abilities to receive affordable, high-quality health care. In an attempt to address this challenge, historic national health care reform legislation was passed in March of 2010. Over the past few years a number of organizations committed to higher quality and lower costs have come together ahead of the Medicare Shared Savings program to try and form ACOs in the commercial sector and through Medicare and Medicaid pilot programs. The experiences of these organizations, as well as the research of health care policy experts from across the country, have led to the development of one of the first attempts to lay out succinct guidance for the successful implementation of an ACO – the ACO Toolkit.
Covering key topics in six parts, the ACO Toolkit provides a path forward for the implementation of ACOs across the country. The Toolkit strives to be both specific enough to allow organizations to clearly understand the steps needed to become an ACO, and stay broad enough to make sure the path put forward for implementation is possible for a diverse range of health care provider groups. It will also be updated and supplemented to ensure it stays relevant and helpful to health care providers as they face new challenges in advancing more accountable care. The ACO Toolkit was developed by The Brookings Institution and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
