The Health IT Roadmap for Accountable Care

The Patient Protection and Accountable Care Act’s provisions establishing Accountable Care Organizations have the potential for transformational change by fundamentally altering the clinical, operational and business models driving much of today’s healthcare industry.

To be successful under this new model, ACOs will engage patient populations to maintain their health and well-being, will deliver patient-centered healthcare to the sick in a variety of settings with more efficient, higher quality care, and will empower patients, care givers, and care managers with tools allowing for more informed decisions and facilitating greater collaboration and coordination among a distributed care team.

Foundational to the success of these organizations will be a technology architecture that integrates traditional HIT tools that collect and distribute clinical data with new tools that support population health, clinical workflow, advanced analytics and patient engagement.The 2012 Accountable Care and Health IT Strategies Summit will review a variety of Accountable Care Organizational models and examine Health IT’s role in supporting these new models.

At the Accountable Care HIT Strategies Summit 2012, policy makers and leading HIT strategists provided critical insights and early adopters of leading edge Accountable Care Organization implementations and the associated technology infrastructures presented their experiences. Health IT experts looked at the spectrum of HIT and identified successes and gaps in its ability to support these new models.

At the summit Jim Adams, a managing director at The Advisory Board Company, presented a workshop: The Health IT Roadmap for Accountable Care. This session described the various types or levels of risk that organizations will likely assume under accountable care and the IT-related capabilities that they will need for each type of risk to be successful. Working with the IT Strategy Council, Jim’s career focuses on the intersection of business, IT, and strategy. He serves on national committees and advisory boards for health care organizations and is a frequent speaker on strategic health care and health IT topics, including the future of health care, health information technology, accountable care, and related topics.