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A 6th Difference Between ACOs and “AC-Like” Arrangements

Last week I wrote about five key differences between formal ACOs (mainly care providers contracting with Medicare)  and informal Accountable Care-Like (AC-Like) arrangements between care providers and commercial health plans.

  1. Transaction costs
  2. Timing
  3. Incrementalism
  4. Flexibility
  5. Capital cost

There’s an important  6th  difference worth noting:

Visibility

Elephants

Formal ACOs will be visible from miles away — think elephants on the Serengeti.

An ACO that wants to contract with Medicare must establish itself as a corporation. The Medicare ACO models have substantial disclosure and reporting requirements. We won’t know everything about formal ACOs, but we will know a lot. ACOs cannot hide.

Chameleon

AC-Like arrangements between care providers and commercial payers could be much more difficult to spot and categorize — think chameleons in the jungle.  

These informal AC-Like arrangements can be made through private contracts — therefore not necessarily publicly identifable. Some AC-Like arrangements have been visible and have been announced with press releases and confetti — but it’s also forseeable that there will be circumstances where deals will be quietly negotiated without fanfare.

Chameleons can choose to blend in, or they can change their colors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Feel free to republish this post with attribution.

5 Comments

  1. Perficient Health IT on March 15, 2012 at 7:42 pm

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  3. Aparna M K on March 16, 2012 at 12:18 am

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  4. Aparna M K on March 16, 2012 at 12:19 am

    A 6th Difference Between ACOs and “AC-Like” Arrangements | e-CareManagement Blog http://t.co/15sMsWMa



  5. Michael Stanton on March 30, 2012 at 2:45 pm

    A 6th Difference Between ACOs and “AC-Like” Arrangements: Last week I wrote about five key differences between f… http://t.co/nxbMOXwH