Many of you reading this column joined Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs) sometime between 2011 and 2016. As the power of prevention, wellness, and the medical home model are starting to be realized and appreciated, those benefits may be swamped by two new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services value-based revenue streams that did not exist when many of you first joined your ACO.
The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) was passed in 2015 and is just now being implemented. Value-based, fee-for-service payments started out rather modestly a few years ago as chronic care management codes, but they have exploded to include more than 20 codes, counting the new ones coming online in 2018. Let’s call them collectively value-based care codes, or VCCs.
Many practices are trying to understand and perform the basic requirements to avoid penalties under MACRA’s Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) program. Some primary care practices, however, see the upside potential and bonuses stacking up to 30% or more.
Did you know that even if you are in, let’s say, a basic Medicare Shared Savings Program ACO – the MSSP Track 1, with no exposure to risk – you get special treatment on reporting under MACRA as a MIPS Advanced Practice Model (APM)?
But more importantly, MACRA is a team game. Getting into an MSSP Track 1 is justified just to get practice for the care coordination you’ll need. Few physicians know that they are judged under MACRA MIPS for the total costs of their patients, not just their own costs. A primary care physician receives only up to 8% of the $10 million your patients consume on average. The best way to counter that is through an ACO.
Further, we are aware of ACOs that have chosen risk-taking Medicare models such as NextGen, even though they predict small losses. Those losses are because of the automatic 5% fee-for-service payment bump to its physicians for risk taking if they are in a MACRA Advanced Alternative Payment Model (AAPM).