Savings from Year 1 of Pioneer ACO Program

In the first year of Medicare’s Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) program, the 32 participating provider organizations achieved a 1.2% savings while maintaining or improving performance on measures of quality of patient care.

These overall savings may be encouraging news in the long struggle to curb rising health care spending, but they don’t tell the whole story. The ultimate success of the program will depend on the details.

Using local control groups and rigorous methods that differed from calculations of savings by the CMS via comparisons of ACO spending with benchmarks, researchers at Harvard Medical School found that spending reductions achieved in the first year of the Pioneer program amounted to $118 million. This was more than the $76 million in bonuses paid to the ACOs by CMS, for a net savings to Medicare of $42 million.

Read more at Harvard: http://bit.ly/1IRRH12