Accountable Care Organizations
Accountable Care Organizations to reduce health care costs
Our Dilemma
As many of you know, the gov’t has been starting programs to maintain our society’s current standard of living while chipping away our national deficit. So, what’s their next project that’s helping us out? The answer is ACOs or Accountable Care Organizations. The gov’t performed countless research on our health care system and came to the conclusion that it’s very decentralized. Health care providers weren’t communicating with one another about their patients - causing duplicated medical testing on patients and driving up costs. The gov’t also found baby-boomers are approaching their retirement age. This shift will put a major strain on all gov’t sponsored health care services like Medicare or Medicaid, as 2 out of 3 Americans over the age of 65 suffers from multiple chronic conditions.
What Are ACOs and How Can They Help?
NPR’s article, "Accountable Care Organizations, Explained," defines ACOs as, ‘a network of doctors and hospitals that shares responsibility for providing care to patients.’ The goal is to reduce duplicated/unnecessary tests without compromising the patient’s health and help drive costs down. Additionally, the gov’t will provide incentives for ACOs to keep patients healthy and out of the health care system. This program is purely voluntary and patients will have to option to visit doctors outside the program if they choose.
It is estimated the program will save Medicare close to $1 billion over the next 3 years. Arkansas is reported to save $372 million over the next 6 years alone. It’s nowhere near our $15 trillion debt, but it’s a sizable chunk that we can look forward to.
FORCE Therapeutics designs web and mobile applications for injury rehabilitation and prevention.
FORCE TherEx and FORCE Premium are known to be the BEST EMR and HEP products in Physical Therapy and Rehab.
Please visit our website at www.forcetherapeutics.com
What the ACA ruling means for Physical Therapists
by: Alexis Fotiu and Bronwyn Spira PT
The Supreme Court ruling on health care was announced today, upholding President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA). The law requires individuals to have health insurance, either through their employers or a state-sponsored exchange. Beginning in 2014, people without health insurance will face a fine. The law also requires insurance companies to cover preventative care at no additional cost to consumers, bars insurers from setting a dollar limit on health coverage payouts, and bans them from denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. So what does this mean for doctors and clinics?
The number of individuals who will require health insurance will double. This means insurance companies are going to have to cover a lot more costs while doctors can expect to treat twice as many patients. The problem with this is that doctors need time and resources to provide quality care. If they are seeing two patients in the amount of time they used to treat one, people are concerned they will not be able to receive the quality care they need. Companies are going to have to cover health insurance for more people. In order for them to do this, reimbursements are going to be less per visit and doctors are going to be required to see more patients per day, so doctors need to act more efficiently. One great solution for this is for doctors to use technology that enables them to speed up administrative time, lower costs, and allows them to spend quality time with their patients.
Digital technology in health care is becoming increasingly popular as doctors see the benefits to using programs and devices that save them time. Doctors can use these programs on devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones to record and send information during the visit that they used to have to sit and input after patient visits (creating long hours of administrative work). Patients use these devices to download programs that monitor their health and receive information instantly. These programs will become crucial to healthcare professionals as their patient load increases.
The American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) released a statement soon after the ruling stating, “While neutral on the ACA from the beginning, APTA has for years been an advocate for a health care system that includes rehabilitation as a core benefit, demonstrates the value of physical therapy to patients, embraces innovation in reforms that are patient centered, and provides a solution to a system that for too long has been in high costs and disparate in outcomes and quality”. From a practical standpoint, physical therapists will need to adopt technologies that improve efficiency and speed up workflow as they experience an influx of patients as a result of the ACA. These technologies allow for physical therapists to provide quality care while saving time spent on administrative work (time that could and should be spent treating more patients). Whether you support the ACA or not, one thing is certain: it will result in a need for more physical therapists to embrace innovations that will allow them to continue to provide quality care.
FORCE therapeutics designs web and mobile applications for injury rehabilitation and prevention.
FORCE TherEx and FORCE Premium are known to be the BEST EMR and HEP products in Physical Therapy and Rehab.
Please visit our website at www.forcetherapeutics.com
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