Using data analytics provides Accountable Care Organizations with valuable insights into improving success within the ACO model for Medicare and Medicaid patients. Through the utilization of data analytics, ACOs are able to gain a deeper understanding of patient populations, identify trends and patterns, and uncover opportunities for enhancing care delivery and management. By leveraging the power of data, ACOs can optimize resource allocation, enhance patient outcomes, streamline administrative processes, and ultimately drive improvements in healthcare quality and cost-efficiency. With the help of data analytics, ACOs are empowered to make data-driven decisions and implement targeted interventions that lead to better coordination of care, reduced hospital readmissions, and increased patient satisfaction. By harnessing the potential of data analytics, Accountable Care Organizations can truly transform healthcare delivery and achieve greater success in the ACO model for Medicare and Medicaid patients.
Using Insights to Improve ACO Success
Accountable Care Organizations are made up of many moving pieces. This can make it difficult to discover where there is room for improvement within the organization. Using data analytics, trouble areas can be found and improved, resulting in increased success for both the ACO and their patients.
What Are Accountable Care Organizations?
An Accountable Care Organization (ACO) is a group of hospitals, doctors, and other healthcare providers. These different entities come together in an ACO to give coordinated and high quality care to the Medicare Patients they are responsible for. Many ACOs were formed due to the ACO Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health (ACO REACH) model, which was made to encourage healthcare providers to form ACOs.
Who Benefits from ACOs?
Patients benefit immensely when being treated by an ACO. The coordinated care provided by an ACO ensures that patients get the appropriate care as soon as it is needed. Coordinated care also has the added effect of cutting down on duplicate services and medical errors, which means less risk for patients undergoing medical procedures.
It is not only patients who benefit, but also the medical providers who make up the ACO. An ACO causes a higher quality of care to be provided to patients, which results in lower costs for Medicare. The ACO is then able to share in the savings it achieves for Medicare.
What Types of Insights Improve ACO Success?
High quality healthcare is a complicated and multifaceted entity. It can be difficult for an ACO to discover what changes they should make and where, in order to be the most effective. Using data analytics, an ACO can be provided with insights on how to improve their own success, as well as the success and health of their medicare patients. There are a few different insights that ACOs are likely to find the most useful when using data analytics.
Provider Performance
The most obvious use of data analytics is to gauge the performance of the individual healthcare providers who make up the ACO. This includes how quickly they are seeing patients, how many patients they are treating per day, and the amount of medical mistakes being made. Using this data, an ACO can see in what areas a provider is falling short and where changes may need to be made. Implementing these changes can have a marked improvement on the care being provided to patients.
Patient Population
Insights into the patient population can be extremely useful in determining what social and medical needs patients are likely to have. Data analytics can tell you if your patient population is living below the poverty line, which can be a huge indicator of what social needs they have that are not being met. Equally as useful is learning where your patient population resides geographically. Geographical location will give you insight regarding patient’s:
- Safety
- Social connection
- Race/Ethnicity
- Migration
- Incarceration
- Military deployment
- Education
- Employment
- Finances
- Nutrition
- Housing
- Access to health services
Knowing this information can help an ACO to learn what kind of medical care its patients are most likely to need, and when. This allows ACO’s to put resources where they are most needed, which will help treat patients with a higher success rate.
Analyzing Care Costs
Data Analytics will also give ACOs insight into their healthcare costs. This includes what they are spending money on and exactly how much money they are spending on it. This can help ACOs to find areas where they may be able to lower costs and also areas that may be underfunded, resulting in lower overall costs and more efficient spending.
