Introducing Accountable Care Organizations(ACO) Technology

Fee-for-service model is out whereas Accountable Care Organization or ACO is the “in vogue” thing now.  The sole purpose of this model is to of course improve coordination as well as delivery of healthcare along lines that are both affordable and efficient.  In other words, it is to bring sophisticated treatments within the reach of the common man.

Important Elements of an ACO

The three distinguishing features of an ACO are:

1.  Continuity of care across varied institutional setups.

2.  The ability to forecast costs and resource requirements and budgeting of the same.

3.   To reliably measure performance across the entire organization.

Now there is a single technology tool that acts as a common denominator for all of the above, the EHR.  The EHR is an enterprise version cousin of the EMR, but which in addition to the former’s medical record keeping abilities incorporates other state-of-the art functionalities like patient registries, e-pharmacy, clinical decision support system, in-built practice management system etc among others.

But any EHR would not do.  To grab those Meaningful Use dollars the EHR most likely needs to be CCHIT certified, multi-interfacing, more ACO features than the simple patient portal, be ICD-10 and 5010 ready, and have minimal rollout gap.

Even if your organization has homed in on such an EHR, you would in all likelihood require a third party technical support, besides the EHR vendor support system to really have that rollout gap under tight control.  Else you might end up paying a higher price for this transition than if you had continued impasse.

Contact us BillingParadise at 1-888-571-9069 or steve@billingparadise.com to serve as your eyes and ears during this watershed phase in your clinic’s history.