Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Announced the first year results of its Alternative Quality Contract (AQC) agreements with physicians and hospitals. The AQC is a modified global payment model, designed to encourage cost-effective, patient centered care by paying participating physicians and hospitals for the quality, not the quantity of the care they deliver.
Mount Auburn Hospital and affiliated Mount Auburn Cambridge Independent Practice Association (MACIPA) were among the early adopters of the AQC.
Early overall results of the AQC provide compelling evidence that sharing accountability with providers for health care quality and costs by changing the payment model can stimulate significant improvements in both areas. In the first year of the AQC, improvements in the quality of patient care (overall for the AQC groups) were greater than any one-year change seen previously in our network of hospitals and physicians – significantly exceeding the rates of improvement on quality measures that AQC groups were achieving prior to the contract and outpacing the rates of improvement among non-AQC physicians.
See attached for the full press release and click here for the whitepaper: http://www.bluecrossma.com/visitor/pdf/aqc-results-white-paper.pdf
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