Communications, Connected Care and ACOs, Part 2

Continued from last day, "Communications, Connected Care and ACOs, Part 1" ...


Why are ACOs relevant to Eye Care and the National Eye Care Communications project? 

Changing your practice to demonstrate the ability to be a productive team member is significant and helping you do this is one of the primary goals of the NECC Project.

In a nutshell, ACOs matter. They appear to be all about larger health systems, hospitals and group practices but as the health care reform game plays out ACOs are taking control of access to your patients, in the name of “shared savings”. Your patients still need eye care and if you're not involved in your local ACO, your patients will be awarded to others who are. Hospital-based EHRs don't do as good a job of eye care as your EHRs do, but they are nevertheless certified and meet Meaningful Use criteria. That means you can lose patients to those providers and systems. You owe it to yourself at least to be finding out if you have an ACO in your locality, or if any of the health systems in your area are working toward forming one. Since many ACO's are still at the formative stage, now is the perfect time for you to get involved. Once they're functioning, it may be too late to open the door for your participation.

ACO's are a good example of how health care reform doesn't apply only to providers who take Medicare. As seen in the link above to the list of 80 current ACOs, team-based care and reimbursement has already well surpassed the bounds of CMS. You may not be driven by the CMS EHRs Incentive Program and, certainly, your involvement in the National Eye Care Communications Project doesn’t require meaningful use attestation. But if, by virtue of the fact that you cannot communicate as required with other health care providers, you do not qualify to participate on a chronic care team, then your business consequences will far surpass any CMS penalties.

If you're not already aware of the ACOs being organized in your area, not already talking to "the powers that be", you may have an uphill battle to be included. We encourage all NECC Project participants to get on this now. It's critical that eye care providers be involved in chronic care teams. The question is not whether ACOs want to include eye care; it’s whether the ECP will be a hospital-based employee or potentially an independent eye care provider.


Alistair Jackson, M.Ed.
Jim Grue, O.D.