Marketing Hospice and Palliative Care to ACOs

Accountable Care Organizations continue to grow rapidly in importance in the United States as a vehicle for healthcare cost control and improved coordination of care. In eight states, ACOs now cover more than 20% of the population, with Medicare ACOs making up 37% of all ACO covered lives nationwide. In fact, Medicare ACOs are now the fastest-growing type of ACO.

Unfortunately, ACOs have in the past given limited attention to end-of-life care. Studies examining the effect of ACOs on end of life care have found few measurable changes in the use of hospice, and in fact three quarters of ACOs in the Medicare Shared Savings Program didn’t include any hospice or palliative care providers in their contracts. But that may be about to change.

In December 2018, right before the holidays, Medicare announced sweeping changes to the structure and incentives of the most common type of ACO under the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP). Beginning this year, ACOs participating in the program have no more than 3 years maximum to begin accepting down-side risk arrangements or be excluded from the program. Down-side risk means that ACOs in the program will not only share in any cost savings they achieve, but could also lose substantial amounts of money if they fail to meet savings targets set by Medicare. We at Schramm Consulting believe that this will enforce greater cost discipline for the ACO owners and may offer greater opportunities to hospice and palliative care providers than they’ve enjoyed up until now.

This April, at the NHPCO Leadership and Advocacy Conference in Washington DC, firm principal Sue Lyn Schramm led a session on the topic of marketing hospice and palliative care to ACO executives. There was a great deal of interest in the material because of this year’s changes to the program, and many attendees requested copies of the slides. In the spirit of generosity, we are happy to make these materials available. We ask only that you reserve the materials for your own use, as they remain under copyright by Schramm Consulting. We hope that by sharing techniques and information to help hospice leaders market to potential ACO partners we can help make the case for why hospice should be a part of all ACO networks.

Please contact us if you would like us to present this material onsite at your organization, or if we can be of service in any other way.

The “View PDF” button will preview a PDF version of the slides used in Sue Lyn’s ACO presentation. The “Download Slides” button will start a download of the complete PowerPoint slides from the presentation.