Delivery System Redesign

State policymakers increasingly recognize that improving health outcomes is as much about addressing the social determinants of poor health as it is about providing high-quality medical care. Medicaid accountable care organizations (ACOs), or other ACO-like models, offer a prime opportunity to meld population health and payment and delivery system reforms. This brief explores state strategies for promoting population health through Medicaid ACOs. It provides background information on population health approaches and Medicaid delivery system reforms and describes various state strategies to inform ACO design and governance structures, program components, metrics, and information-sharing mechanisms. It also includes some promising early examples from three states — Minnesota, Oregon, and Vermont — working to embed population health strategies in Medicaid ACO program requirements.

This report provides a review of safety-net systems across the country, identifying their experiences, lessons, and successes in adapting and responding to health care reform. The purpose is to capture transformations occurring across systems varying financially, while also caring for a large number of low-income patients, to document their actions and innovations as well as implications and potential considerations for the California safety net. As such, this study intends to build on and add a unique dimension to the existing body of work on safety-net hospital systems transformations nationally and in California.

Health disparities persist in the United States, with disadvantaged groups disproportionately bearing the burden of poor health outcomes and shortened lifespans. States cannot effectively control healthcare costs or improve quality without addressing health disparities. Fortunately, state and federal policymakers can work together to build an equitable health care delivery system by aligning payment models, creating new partnerships, and building infrastructure and data systems to reduce health disparities. This brief reflects on a discussion of health equity held at a meeting of state and federal leaders convened by the National Academy for State Health Policy, and includes examples of several states’ efforts to promote health equity.

Across the country, states are exploring the viability of Medicaid accountable care organizations (ACOs) that align provider and payer incentives to focus on value instead of volume, with the goal of keeping patients healthy and costs manageable. To date, eight states have launched Medicaid ACO programs, and nine more are actively pursuing them. This fact sheet walks through current progress for Medicaid ACOs. It describes how emerging state programs are seeking to drive accountability through three key activities: (1) implementing a value-based payment structure; (2) measuring quality improvement; and (3) collecting and analyzing data. It also provides a glimpse of some early state successes.