The term “Accountable Care Organization”, or ACO, is used to describe a primary physician centric healthcare delivery system with a shared savings compensation model. ACOs are primary physician-centric groups of doctors, specialists, hospitals, and other health care providers, who voluntarily come together with a proper legal structure 
which aims to provide coordinated high-quality care to the patient population they serve. Coordinated care helps ensure that patients, especially the chronically ill, get the right care at the right time, with the goal of avoiding unnecessary duplication of services and preventing medical errors. When an ACO succeeds in both delivering high-quality care and spending health care dollars more wisely, it will share in the savings it achieves for the Medicare program.
The ACO concept, or model, aims to change the way the system provides health care from reactive to proactive, and the way providers get paid for their services from fee-for-service based to quality outcome (performance) based. Starting on January 1 2012, the 32 selected ACO pioneers have been blazing the trail towards a model that has as many skeptics as it does firm and passionate believers.
Download our new white paper, “The Intelligent ACO: A Primer” to learn more about this topic.
