Salt Lake City, March 15, 2019— New research from the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy and Leavitt Partners shows that while most Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have committed to continue participating in the recently overhauled flagship Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), physician-led ACOS are leaving at a higher rate than in 2017. Highlights of this … Read more

As we noted in July, CMS declined Massachusetts’ Medicaid 1115 demonstration request to establish a closed formulary.  The proposed program would have given Massachusetts the ability to exclude certain FDA-approved drugs from coverage and thereby given the state additional leverage in negotiating rebates.  The state and drug manufacturers would have otherwise continued to be subject to the rest of … Read more

Washington, DC, September 21, 2018 – A Medicare program begun in 2012 to coordinate health care and be accountable for patients’ health saved Medicare $313 million in 2017, the first time the program generated net savings for the federal government, a two-part blog post released Thursday and Friday by Health Affairs reports. The post, by … Read more

As the United States continues to move toward a value-based health care system, significant challenges slow down our progress. Political pressure exists from all sides, incentives have yet to be appropriately aligned, and the pressing need to change stakeholder behavior remains a time-sensitive imperative. Solving these challenges requires going beyond admiring the challenges to implementing … Read more

Salt Lake City, August 14, 2018 –Today, Health Affairs released “Recent Progress in the Value Journey: Grown of ACOs and Value-Based Payment Models in 2018,” a blog presenting figures on accountable care organization (ACO) and value-based payment (VBP) adoption from the past year and discusses the implications of these trends for the future. The post … Read more

Salt Lake City, March 12, 2018 – Strategic provider partnerships are critical for an accountable care organization’s (ACO) economic survival and can add significant value for the consumer. In the March edition of Managed Care Leavitt Partners provides a framework for ACOs to assess individual partners and to determine the types of providers with whom … Read more

In two original articles published in The American Journal of Accountable Care, the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy and Leavitt Partners examine quality improvements and cost savings in the first four years of the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), and suggest opportunities for system-wide improvement. The authors examined outcomes for ACOs over time using the … Read more

Washington, D.C., October 4, 2017 — Today the National Association of ACOs (NAACOS) and Leavitt Partners released the results from their first Annual ACO Survey in a Health Affairs article entitled “The 2017 Annual ACO Survey: What Do Current Trends Tell Us About The Future of Accountable Care.” Two-hundred and forty unique ACOs, representing one … Read more

More than 86 million American adults have prediabetes. That number alone is astounding, but perhaps what is even more concerning is that 9 out of 10 people with prediabetes don’t know they have it.  Considering that, in the absence of any health intervention, 15‒30 percent of people with prediabetes will develop type 2 diabetes within … Read more

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the CDC, in 2015 over 33,000 people died from opioid overdose in the United States, and in 2013 prescription opioid abuse cost the U.S. economy approximately $78.5 billion in costs related to health care, crime, and loss of productivity. Opioid abuse and the related overdose deaths are harming individuals, families, the … Read more