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SOFHA Updates

SoFHA’s Patient-Centered Care Affirmed


Qualable-logoThe article below shares the good news that membership for Qualuable Medical Professionals, a local Accountable Care Organization (ACO), has been renewed by the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services. SoFHA, along with four other medical groups in the Tri-Cities (TN/VA) region, make up Qualuable, which is part of a national initiative championing excellence in responsive, patient-centered healthcare.

Qualuable Medical Selected as ACO

KINGSPORT – Qualuable Medical Professionals has been selected as one of nearly 150 renewing Medicare Shared Savings Program Accountable Care Organizations, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced this week. That brings the total to 434 Shared Savings Program ACOs serving over 7.7 million beneficiaries. Doctors, hospitals and health care providers establish ACOs in order to work together to provide higher-quality coordinated care to their patients, while helping to slow healthcare cost growth.

Qualuable Medical Professionals will be one of 434 ACOs participating in the Shared Savings Program as of Jan. 1, 2016. Beneficiaries seeing health care providers in ACOs have the freedom to choose doctors inside or outside of the ACO.

ACOs receive a portion of the Medicare savings generated from lowering the growth in health care costs as long as they also meet standards for high-quality care.

“People across America are going to be better care providers, because these hospitals and providers have made a commitment to innovation, a commitment to change how they do business and care for patients,” Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell said. “Medicare, and the health care system as a whole, is moving toward paying providers based on the quality, rather than just the quantity of care they give patients. The three new ACO initiatives that are being launched today mark an important step forward in this effort.”

Since ACOs first began participating in the program in early 2012, thousands of health care providers have signed on to participate in the program. The new and renewing ACOs will bring approximately 15,000 additional physicians into the ACO program starting Jan. 1, 2016.

For more information, go to http://www.qualuable.com/.

From Jan. 16, 2016, edition of Kingsport Times News.

Posted in SOFHA Updates