Accountable Care Organizations

What are your thoughts about the emerging accountable care organizations? In what ways do you think they will affect the current health care delivery system? How do you think the practice patterns of primary care physicians will change under the new models of health care? What are the biggest problems that this could bring to primary care practices? Provide references to support your answer.
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Accountable Care Organizations

1. What are your thoughts about the emerging ACOs?
   1.1. The US Health system is faced with the following challenges:
   1.1.1. aging population
   1.1.2. Rising Health care costs
   1.1.3. Healthcare programme reimbursement cuts,
   1.1.4. Government deficits
   1.1.5. Poor health status problems:
   This situation calls for a future health model that focuses on affordability while improving on doing more with less and achieving high levels of patient care quality.
   By definition, Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are organizations where groups of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers, agree to come together voluntarily to give coordinated high quality care to their Medicare patients.
   The main objective of this arrangement being to ensure that patients, especially the chronically ill, get the right care at the right time, while avoiding unnecessary duplication of costly services and preventing medical errors. When an ACO achieves success or makes a profit through spending health care dollars more wisely or delivers high-quality care, it will share in the savings it achieves for the Medicare program. (cms.gov)
   My thoughts would therefore be that emerging ACOs are a welcome development as they will enhance the goal of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) which emphasises the following goals:
   1.2. Benefits of ACOs
   1.2.1. Reducing costs demonstrated by reduction in the highest drivers of health care costs. Targeting the key drivers of health care costs mainly inpatient costs, hospital readmissions, visiting an emergency room, the cost of medicines and laboratory tests.
   1.2.2. Increasing efficiency demonstrated by achieving more with less resources
   1.2.3. Increasing quality of care
   1.2.4. Better …