Skip to main content

10 Ways Your ACO can Fail

From Sara Singer and Stephen Shortell, writing in JAMA: "Implementing Accountable Care Organizations: Ten Potential Mistakes and How to Learn From Them."

Mistake #6 is my personal favorite:
"6. Failure to Sufficiently Engage Patients in Self-care Management and Self-determination.   Patients and family members can provide considerable care particularly in managing multiple, complex chronic conditions. Patients need to be both considered a key part of the care team and educated about taking responsibility for their health and health care with support of friends and family members. Many potential ACOs have little experience with this degree of patient engagement."
Really?  "Little experience?" Try none.   Try less-than none, if unlearning a raft of bad habits counts as negative experience.  I predict we'll see more than one ACO fail due to an utter inability to spell either 'customer' or 'engagement' without being spotted the first seven letters.

Those ACOs will do everything technically and legally correct - hire the docs, buy the EMRs, redesign the organizations - only to realize too late that their long-term success hinges on convincing people to eat fewer hamburgers and more vegetables.  Good luck with that.

[Read more...]

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.
Post a Comment
Read more

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...
3 comments
Read more