Dropout by Dartmouth Raises Questions on Health Law Cost-Savings Effort
By Robert Pear
The New York Times, September 10, 2016
In its quest to remake the nation’s health care system, the Obama administration has urged doctors and hospitals to band together to improve care and cut costs, using a model devised by researchers at Dartmouth College.
But Dartmouth itself, facing mounting financial losses in the federal program, has dropped out, raising questions about the future of the new entities known as accountable care organizations, created under the Affordable Care Act.
The entities are in the vanguard of efforts under the health law to move Medicare away from a disjointed fee-for-service system to a new model that rewards doctors who collaborate and coordinate care.
“There’s little in the way of analysis or data about how A.C.O.s did in 2015,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The results have not been a home run.”
In addition, he said, “there is little reason to think that A.C.O.s will bend the cost curve in a meaningful way” unless they bear more financial risk, sharing losses as well as savings with the government.
An evaluation for the federal government found that Dartmouth’s accountable care organization had reduced Medicare spending on hospital stays, medical procedures, imaging and tests. And it achieved goals for the quality of care. But it was still subject to financial penalties because it did not meet money-saving benchmarks set by federal officials.
“We were cutting costs and saving money and then paying a penalty on top of that,” said Dr. Robert A. Greene, an executive vice president of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock health system. “We would have loved to stay in the federal program, but it was just not sustainable.”
Dr. Elliott S. Fisher, the director of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, said: “It’s hard to achieve savings if, like Dartmouth, you are a low-cost provider to begin with. I helped design the model of accountable care organizations. So it’s sad that we could not make it work here.”
Dartmouth-Hitchcock is the main teaching hospital for Dartmouth’s medical school, of which the Dartmouth Institute is part.
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Creating Accountable Care Organizations: The Extended Hospital Medical Staff
By Elliott S. Fisher, Douglas O. Staiger, Julie P.W. Bynum and Daniel J. Gottlieb
Health Affairs, January 2007 (online December 2006)
Abstract
Many current policies and approaches to performance measurement and payment reform focus on individual providers; they risk reinforcing the fragmented care and lack of coordination experienced by patients with serious illness. In this paper we show that Medicare beneficiaries receive most of their care from relatively coherent local delivery systems comprising physicians and the hospitals where they work or admit their patients. Efforts to create accountable care organizations at this level — the extended hospital medical staff — deserve consideration as a potential means of improving the quality and lowering the cost of care.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/26/1/w44.abstract
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How does the Affordable Care Act define ACOs?
Comment by Don McCanne, M.D.
Quote of the Day, October 28, 2010
Excerpt
So how do ACOs achieve higher quality and lower cost?
The ACOs are not rewarded monetarily for meeting the quality standards. Their motivation to comply is to avoid being suspended from the program.
Costs are reduced by the shared savings program. A benchmark is established for each ACO “using the most recent available 3 years of per-beneficiary expenditures for parts A and B services for Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries assigned to the ACO.” If the ACO can provide care for costs below the benchmark, the ACO then shares those savings with HHS. The benchmark is reset at the beginning of each 3 year agreement.
If the costs are above the benchmark, then the fees are still paid as usual, with no adjustments.
Think about this. The incentives continue to promote greater volume. There is no penalty for running the charges up. Is the reward for reducing the volume and intensity of services enough? Since fixed costs for the ACO are relatively unchanged, the reductions in marginal overhead expenses due to reduced volume must be greater than the amount of savings that HHS shares with the ACO in order to come out ahead. Since this is the opposite of “making it up in volume,” it is more likely that net income will be reduced. Further, since the benchmarks are reset every 3 years based on lower utilization, it is very unlikely that that the ACO could continue to ratchet down services to qualify for shared savings.
(A later iteration included penalties for failure to meet savings targets.)
https://www.pnhp.org/news/2010/october/how-does-the-affordable-care-act-define-acos
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Elliott Fisher questions whether ACOs will work
Comment by Don McCanne, M.D.
Quote of the Day, March 28, 2011
Excerpt
Accountable care organizations (ACOs) began as an abstract concept of integrating health care providers into a not-yet-defined entity that would be rewarded for improving quality and reducing costs. Without knowing what they were, Congress included them in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Dartmouth’s Elliott Fisher, who was one of the first to promote the concept, now says that “there are some really important questions about whether this will work.”
https://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/march/elliott-fisher-questions-whether-acos-will-work
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Comment:
By Don McCanne, M.D.
Elliott Fisher and his colleagues at the Dartmouth Institute are generally credited with introducing in 2006 the concept of the accountable care organization (ACO) – coordinated organizations of hospitals and their extended medical staffs that would improve quality and lower costs (HMO 2.0?). The concept was incorporated into the Affordable Care Act. But by 2011, we should have been concerned when Elliott Fisher said, “there are some really important questions about whether this will work.”
Many doubts have been expressed about this model, and after a decade of fooling around with it, the record can be summed up by Ashish Jha’s understatement, “The results have not been a home run.”
Well it did not work for Dartmouth-Hitchcock in spite of Elliott Fisher’s presence. They dropped out of the program a year ago (though Robert Pear’s article provides much needed transparency on the ACO concept). Fisher said that he helped design the model so it is sad that they couldn’t make it work there. He said that it was hard for Dartmouth-Hitchcock to achieve savings since they were already “a low cost provider.”
But it should not have been a surprise. In a Quote of the Day in 2010 (excerpt above) we explained why, in a “think about this” comment, that the basic concept was fundamentally flawed – the reward for participation being that you would have to give a major portion of your savings to Medicare instead of keeping them as profits (Medicare shared savings).
It’s too bad that Congress didn’t listen to those of us expressing concerns when they included the concept in the Affordable Care Act. Yet acting CMS administrator Andrew Slavitt is moving forward, saying that the current iteration is “like the iPhone 2.” If you read the thousands of pages of rules that CMS is generating, it is clear that this will be a godsend – for those profiting from administrative services, that is.
Abstractions of higher quality and lower costs sound great, but you need proven policy to carry them out. The single payer experiments have already been done, and they work! Even Gail Wilensky says, “Enough demonstrations, already.”
