Our AMA adopts the following Accountable Care Organization (ACO) principles:
1. Guiding Principle – The goal of an ACO is to increase access to care, improve the quality of care and ensure the efficient delivery of care. Within an ACO, a physician’s primary ethical and professional obligation is the well-being and safety of the patient.
2. ACO Governance – ACOs must be physician-led and encourage an environment of collaboration among physicians. ACOs must be physician-led to ensure that a physician’s medical decisions are not based on commercial interests but rather on professional medical judgment that puts patients’ interests first.
A. Medical decisions should be made by physicians. ACOs must be operationally structured and governed by an appropriate number of physicians to ensure that medical decisions are made by physicians (rather than lay entities) and place patients’ interests first. Physicians are the medical professionals best qualified by training, education, and experience to provide diagnosis and treatment of patients. Clinical decisions must be made by the physician or physician-controlled entity. The AMA supports true collaborative efforts between physicians, hospitals and other qualified providers to form ACOs as long as the governance of those arrangements ensure that physicians control medical issues.
B. The ACO should be governed by a board of directors that is elected by the ACO professionals. Any physician-entity [e.g., Independent Physician Association (IPA), Medical Group, etc.] that contracts with, or is otherwise part of, the ACO should be physician-controlled and governed by an elected board of directors.
C. The ACO’s physician leaders should be licensed in the state in which the ACO operates and in the active practice of medicine in the ACO’s service area.
D. Where a hospital is part of an ACO, the governing board of the ACO should be separate, and independent from the hospital governing board.
3. Physician and patient participation in an ACO should be voluntary. Patient participation in an ACO should be voluntary rather than a mandatory assignment to an ACO by Medicare. Any physician organization (including an organization that bills on behalf of physicians under a single tax identification number) or any other entity that creates an ACO must obtain the written affirmative consent of each physician to participate in the ACO. Physicians should not be required to join an ACO as a condition of contracting with Medicare, Medicaid or a private payer or being admitted to a hospital medical staff.
4. The savings and revenues of an ACO should be retained for patient care services and distributed to the ACO participants.
5. Flexibility in patient referral and antitrust laws. The federal and state anti-kickback and self-referral laws and the federal Civil Monetary Penalties (CMP) statute (which prohibits payments by hospitals to physicians to reduce or limit care) should be sufficiently flexible to allow physicians to collaborate with hospitals in forming ACOs without being employed by the hospitals or ACOs. This is particularly important for physicians in small- and medium-sized practices who may want to remain independent but otherwise integrate and collaborate with other physicians (i.e., so-called virtual integration) for purposes of participating in the ACO. The ACA explicitly authorizes the Secretary to waive requirements under the Civil Monetary Penalties statute, the Anti-Kickback statute, and the Ethics in Patient Referrals (Stark) law. The Secretary should establish a full range of waivers and safe harbors that will enable independent physicians to use existing or new organizational structures to participate as ACOs. In addition, the Secretary should work with the Federal Trade Commission to provide explicit exceptions to the antitrust laws for ACO participants. Physicians cannot completely transform their practices only for their Medicare patients, and antitrust enforcement could prevent them from creating clinical integration structures involving their privately insured patients. These waivers and safe harbors should be allowed where appropriate to exist beyond the end of the initial agreement between the ACO and CMS so that any new organizational structures that are created to participate in the program do not suddenly become illegal simply because the shared savings program does not continue.
6. Additional resources should be provided up-front in order to encourage ACO development. CMS’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMI) should provide grants to physicians in order to finance up-front costs of creating an ACO. ACO incentives must be aligned with the physician or physician group’s risks (e.g., start-up costs, systems investments, culture changes, and financial uncertainty). Developing this capacity for physicians practicing in rural communities and solo-small group practices requires time and resources and the outcome is unknown. Providing additional resources for the up-front costs will encourage the development of ACOs since the ‘shared savings’ model only provides for potential savings at the back-end, which may discourage the creation of ACOs (particularly among independent physicians and in rural communities).
7. The ACO spending benchmark should be adjusted for differences in geographic practice costs and risk adjusted for individual patient risk factors.
A. The ACO spending benchmark, which will be based on historical spending patterns in the ACO’s service area and negotiated between Medicare and the ACO, must be risk-adjusted in order to incentivize physicians with sicker patients to participate in ACOs and incentivize ACOs to accept and treat sicker patients, such as the chronically ill.
B. The ACO benchmark should be risk-adjusted for the socioeconomic and health status of the patients that are assigned to each ACO, such as income/poverty level, insurance status prior to Medicare enrollment, race, and ethnicity and health status. Studies show that patients with these factors have experienced barriers to care and are more costly and difficult to treat once they reach Medicare eligibility.
C. The ACO benchmark must be adjusted for differences in geographic practice costs, such as physician office expenses related to rent, wages paid to office staff and nurses, hospital operating cost factors (i.e., hospital wage index) and physician HIT costs.
D. The ACO benchmark should include a reasonable spending growth rate based on the growth in physician and hospital practice expenses as well as the patient socioeconomic and health status factors.
E. In addition to the shared savings earned by ACOs, ACOs that spend less than the national average per Medicare beneficiary should be provided an additional bonus payment. Many physicians and physician groups have worked hard over the years to establish systems and practices to lower their costs below the national per Medicare beneficiary expenditures. Accordingly, these practices may not be able to achieve significant additional shared savings to incentivize them to create or join ACOs. A bonus payment for spending below the national average would encourage these practices to create ACOs and continue to use resources appropriately and efficiently.
8. The quality performance standards required to be established by the Secretary must be consistent with AMA policy regarding quality. The ACO quality reporting program must meet the AMA principles for quality reporting, including the use of nationally-accepted, physician specialty-validated clinical measures developed by the AMA-specialty society quality consortium; the inclusion of a sufficient number of patients to produce statistically valid quality information; appropriate attribution methodology; risk adjustment; and the right for physicians to appeal inaccurate quality reports and have them corrected. There must also be timely notification and feedback provided to physicians regarding the quality measures and results.
9. An ACO must be afforded procedural due process with respect to the Secretary’s discretion to terminate an agreement with an ACO for failure to meet the quality performance standards.
10. ACOs should be allowed to use different payment models. While the ACO shared-savings program is limited to the traditional Medicare fee-for-service reimbursement methodology, the Secretary has discretion to establish ACO demonstration projects. ACOs must be given a variety of payment options and allowed to simultaneously employ different payment methods, including fee-for-service, capitation, partial capitation, medical homes, care management fees, and shared savings. Any capitation payments must be risk-adjusted.
11. The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Patient Satisfaction Survey should be used as a tool to determine patient satisfaction and whether an ACO meets the patient-centeredness criteria required by the ACO law.
12. Interoperable Health Information Technology and Electronic Health Record Systems are key to the success of ACOs. Medicare must ensure systems are interoperable to allow physicians and institutions to effectively communicate and coordinate care and report on quality.
13. If an ACO bears risk like a risk bearing organization, the ACO must abide by the financial solvency standards pertaining to risk-bearing organizations.
Policy Timeline
Res. 819, I-10 Reaffirmation A-11 Reaffirmed: Res. 215, A-11 Reaffirmation: I-12 Reaffirmed: CMS Rep. 6, I-13 Reaffirmed: Sub. Res. 711, A-15 Reaffirmation I-15 Reaffirmation: A-16 Reaffirmation: I-17