Welcome!

Welcome to the first post of the new Arcadia Solutions blog on managing effectively under Accountable Care. We hope that you will find this to be a frank and honest discussion of the issues facing all healthcare provider organizations, regardless of their interest or desire to become an Accountable Care Organization. Further, this will be informed by the journeys we are taking today with our clients. We will attempt to keep it interesting, factual, light-hearted at times, and most importantly to make it directly applicable to what our readers need to do, now, to succeed.

There is a natural tendency for a corporation-sponsored blog to push products or services. We think of this opportunity in the opposite manner – we want to facilitate a conversation with the healthcare community that allows us to better refine how we add value to our clients – in essence, creating the opportunity to bubble up issues and propose solutions with our readers.

I want to start with a key distinction: the term Accountable Care Organization will apply to a very specific type of healthcare entity that contracts under Medicare in a shared-savings program. We will often refer to “managing under accountable care” and this will describe tools, techniques, methods, processes, and controls for all organizations, whether they become or participate in an ACO, to ensure their own success under Reform.

You will be hearing from some of our experts on this blog, and each will introduce themselves as they begin to share their own posts with you. You will hear about the importance of Health IT and achieving Meaningful Use, the challenge and opportunities that undertaking patient-centric models of care present, and the tools you will need to manage performance within your organization so that you are likely to manage the risk associated with current and future contracts.

I’d like to leave you with a thought I have had since I began my career in healthcare: It seems to me that there is a never-ending struggle to find where, within the healthcare creation value-chain, innovation is most applicable. I have seen the effect of creating an ability to innovate at the point of care, measure the results in real-time, create improvement strategies around specific needs of the organization and its patients, and roll those improvements out quickly through a health IT infrastructure.

I will argue in future posts that I believe that the Accountable Care movement is about correctly incenting provider organizations to develop mechanisms of innovation at the critical point-of-care. We have a long way to go before we can prove my hypothesis, but we look forward to engaging in the dialogue with you.