AHRQ Compendium updates show health systems’ growing participation in Accountable Care Organizations
Enhancements to AHRQ’s Compendium of U.S. Health Systems now allow researchers, policymakers and others to learn which systems are augmenting patient services by offering health insurance plans or participating in Accountable Care Organizations or Medicare bundled payment programs.
The compendium’s new hospital linkage file contains comprehensive information on all of the hospitals within each system, greatly increasing the utility of the resource, says AHRQ, by allowing researchers to link the data in the compendium to other available sources of hospital data.
The summaries identify important overall trends. Hospitals in health systems, for example, are much more likely than non-system hospitals to participate in alternative payment models, such as Medicare's Comprehensive Joint Replacement Bundled Payment and the Bundled Payment for Care Improvement Program. And larger systems that own four or more hospitals are much more likely to participate in alternative payment plans and offer insurance products.
AHRQ said this morning that Compendium updates are highlighted in a new new blog post by AHRQ’s Dan Miller, M.S., a social sciences researcher, and Mike Furukawa, Ph.D., a senior economist and director of the agency’s Comparative Health System Performance Initiative.
The highlights also show how participation in alternative payment programs and insurance offerings differ by other system characteristics, such as academic affiliation and ownership type (public, investor owned or nonprofit) and level of uncompensated care.
The new data show that of the 626 systems in the compendium:
· 56 percent have at least one hospital participating in an ACO contract.
· 44 percent of systems hospitals participate in an ACO contract compared to only 13 percent of non-system hospitals.
· 44 percent have at least one hospital that is participating in a Medicare bundled payment model.
· 39 percent offer an insurance product, and 12 percent have at least one Medicare Advantage contract.
