Home Health & Hospice Week

Get ready to rev up your marketing machine as your local hospitals and physician groups form Accountable Care Organizations. Under a recently proposed rule from CMS, ACOs led by hospitals and physicians will coordinate care among multiple providers and share in any program savings (for more details, see Eli's HCW, Vol. XX, No. 14, p. 109).

To get on board an ACO, you'll need to have facts and data showing how you can help hospitals and physicians save money, recommends marketing expert Stephen Tweed with Leading Home Care.

"Hospitals and physician groups will be looking for opportunities to share in the savings for the Medicare program," Tweed says in his electronic newsletter. "Home health agencies will be invited into ACOs when we are able to persuade decision makers that we can contribute to measurable cost savings that will increase revenue for the ACO."

Providers other than primary care physicians can be in multiple ACOs, point out Brad Brotherton and Mark Blessing of BKD in an article on BKD's website.

Keep in mind: You may want to be picky about what ACO(s) you join, though. "CMS strongly believes that, to get real and meaningful change in efficiency and care for patients, ACOs need to be exposed to some risk of shared losses," Brotherton and Blessing note. "Therefore, it is requiring all ACOs to become exposed to some risk by at least the third year of their initial agreement period."

CMS expects 75 to 150 ACOs to participate by 2014, they note.