Caravan Health ACOs Save Medicare $58 million and Achieve Outstanding Quality Scores in 2018

PR Newswire

KANSAS CITY, Mo., Oct. 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Medicare Shared Savings Program performance results released this week show Caravan Health accountable care organizations (ACOs) are leaders in savings and quality scores for another year. Caravan Health ACOs earned total savings for Medicare of $58 million, an increase over 2017 savings. The top Caravan Health performers saved enough money to earn $13.4 million in shared savings.

Quality scores showed Caravan ACOs averaging nearly 90 percent for 2018. These scores reinforce the strong Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) scores from earlier this summer. Each Caravan ACO earned a positive MIPS adjustment for 2018 performance, with an average adjustment of 1.65 percent, close to the maximum of 1.68 percent.

"Each year, Caravan Health, together with our partners, show that our population health methodology is unmatched for producing excellent financial and quality results," said Tim Gronniger, Caravan Health CEO. "We are looking forward to great things over many more years in this program."

One of Caravan's top performers was Southern Michigan Rural ACO, which achieved 9.5 percent in total savings driven by reductions in post-acute care spending of 23 percent compared to the benchmark year. These savings were accompanied by an overall quality score above 90, beating the program average in many measures, including 75 percent in flu vaccines, 79 percent in pneumonia, and significant improvement in skilled nursing facility all-case readmissions. The ACO scored higher on all these measures than in 2017. Patrick Sustrich, Chief Integration Officer of Hayes Green Beach Memorial Hospital, a member of Southern Michigan Rural ACO, will join Caravan Health founder Lynn Barr on a webinar on October 9, 2019, to discuss their approach.

This news highlights the success of the ACO Investment Model (AIM), a program that supported smaller rural providers in the transition to value-based payment. AIM ACOs saved nearly $188 million in its second year, a 3.5 percent reduction in expenditures. Caravan Health was a leader in this program – sponsoring half of the smaller, rural participants that produced about 60 percent of the savings, according to the most recent evaluation.

These outcomes also drive home the importance of scale in building a risk-ready ACO. As individual ACOs, small size could have created losses large enough to require writing a check to CMS, were they in risk-bearing models. If all Caravan's 2018 ACOs had banded together to form a large collaborative ACO, no one would have to write a check. In 2019, Caravan Health launched the nation's largest-ever ACO with more than 225,000 Medicare lives. With fewer, but larger, ACOs, the company expects stronger results each year.

Register for an interactive panel webinar to hear more from our top performing AIM ACOs on Wednesday, October 9 at 3:00 p.m. ET. More information is available at https://caravanhealth.com/aco-investment-model/.

About Caravan Health: Caravan Health is the national leader of successful accountable care and population health programs for community health systems. Caravan Health works with more than 250 health systems, 25,000 providers and hundreds of thousands of patient lives to drive quality, financial benefits and strong physician relationships in accountable care organizations. For more information visit www.caravanhealth.com.

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