Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are all the rage in healthcare as providers look to focus more on quality than on volume of services delivered. But Dr. Robert Margolis, CEO of HealthCare Partners Medical Group, Torrance, Calif., has likened ACOs to unicorns because there has never been a verified sighting of one.
Clinical leaders at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), a $10 billion enterprise that includes 20 hospitals, 400 outpatient treatment sites, and a health plan, believe that the organization has a technology-driven roadmap in place to achieve accountable care.
“This is really ground zero of where all of the wishes of an accountable care organization translate into reality,” Dr. Rasu Shrestha, vice president for medical information technology, told InformationWeek at UPMC’s Center for Connected Medicine this week. The center, on the 60th floor of Pittsburgh’s U.S. Steel Tower, is a showcase for many cutting-edge technologies and processes already in use at UPMC. (The organization made the InformationWeek 500 list for 2010.)
“I think ACOs, like a lot of other things in health IT, have now become the buzzword,” Shrestha said. “But if you look at the core impetus behind an ACO, an accountable care organization, we like to think that we have a lot of those components at hand within UPMC.”
Shrestha, who also is medical director of interoperability and imaging informatics and chief of radiology informatics for the integrated delivery system, said that the idea is to take a patient-centric approach to delivering healthcare services. “It’s really about transforming the way that we practice medicine from volume-based to value-based,” he explained.
via UPMC Leans On Business Intelligence For Accountable Care::Brought to you by TechWeb.