In a national survey published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine (July 2014), Commonwealth Fund–supported researchers found that 28 percent of accountable care organizations (ACOs) have teamed up with community health centers. ACOs with safety-net partners and those without are similar in size, organizational structure, and the services they offer patients. But ACOs that include health centers have greater experience with care management programs, public reporting, and risk-sharing—assets that may prove helpful in meeting targets for quality, population health, and cost control.
Other recent Fund-supported work published in the literature explored:
- the practice environments and job satisfaction in primary care practices that are reinventing themselves as medical homes (Annals of Family Medicine, July/August 2014)
- ways to measure the delivery of “low-value” care, using Medicare claims data for a large national sample of beneficiaries (JAMA Internal Medicine, July 2014)
- the experience of Cambridge Health Alliance, a safety-net health system in Massachusetts that is struggling to address the challenges posed by the Affordable Care Act’s payment reforms (Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, August 2014).