Health and Medicine: ACOs

Your Name
Professor`s Name
Subject
Date
Accountable Care Organizations
What is an ACO?
Accountable Care Organizations or ACOs, as they are better known, consist of a group of health care professionals including doctors and hospitals, that join hands to serve the interests of the patient group that they serve, namely the Medicare based patients by providing them with coordinated next level care/treatment. The main aim of having everything coordinated helps to make sure that duplication of services and chances of medical errors is minimized alongside being able to serve the critically ill patients in a proper and timely manner. As a result of this process, ACOs end up treating the patient well by providing them with quality health care alongside being able to spend their funds more effectively. Thereby the savings that result in this way for the Medicare program are subsequently shared by the ACOs as it is because of their efforts that such savings were achieved in the first place (Accountable Care Organizations: A New Paradigm for Health Care Delivery? - Kaiser Family Foundation).
How will new program affect the relationships among primary care providers, specialist and hospitals?
The new program that has been designed has made it very easy for people to attain high quality health care at affordable rates. The new program is said to increase coordination across the board as far as medical institutions, doctors and hospitals are concerned. According to the new program, those doctors working in ACOs are to share their test results, findings and reports with all other ACOs who are on board the ACO program of Medicare. The basic logic that underlies ACOs are the bonus payments that are made available to groups when they meet the laid down quality standards along with benchmarks as to costs incurred.
Things works best when one has a personal interest in them, and with the new program every concerned member of the ACO has a chance to share the bonus payments and this would greatly increase the coordination amongst them since all have a shared purpose now and would be working together to achieve it. However, one needs to understand how costs would be minimized in the first place. The bonus incentive will induce ACOs to coordinate the care that their patients receive by making sure duplication of tests etc. is avoided and investment in infrastructure and better technology is made, all aimed to...