Accountable Care Organizations
On October 20, 2011, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a final rule that establishes Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) under the Medicare Shared Savings Program of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
If your organization is an independent ACO, or is part of an ACO, two foundational components of the final rule may be of special interest:
- optimizing treatment outcomes to maximize participation in the Shared Saving Program, and
- ensuring patient-centered care.
The iMedConsent™ application is uniquely positioned to assist your ACO with meeting these objectives. This comprehensive informed consent and patient education solution allows for the management of critical patient communications – communications that are essential to optimizing outcomes and ensuring a positive patient experience. The iMedConsent™ application produces:
- Procedure-specific consent forms – these easy-to-understand documents summarize the shared decision-making process that has occurred between patients and providers.
- The standard of care for documenting informed consent in over 200 hospitals, it has been found that 96 percent of patients prefer an informed consent process facilitated with the iMedConsent™ application as opposed to a traditional informed consent process (Issa MA, et al. J Urol. 2006;176:694-699.)
- Illustrated patient education materials – aids that allow providers to help patients better understand their conditions and treatment outcomes as part of a patient-centered care plan.
- The ability to automatically document the provision of timely education documents to the patient’s electronic medical record is described in this NPSF Conference poster.
- Detailed pre-procedure instructions – these materials ensure that patients are prepared for scheduled treatments and procedures, ensuring optimum outcomes and reducing the potential for cancellations.
- A case study detailing the use of the iMedConsent™ application to prepare pre-op instructions may be found in a recent Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare article.
- Comprehensive discharge instructions – documents that enumerate patient responsibilities to minimize the risk of potential complications and reduce the incidence of preventable readmissions.
- The experience of one large medical center’s three-fold reduction in their 14-day readmission rate with use of the iMedConsent™ application is reviewed in this Healthcare Financial Management article.
All of these patient communications materials are available in Spanish as well as in English and they are written at a level that is understandable by patients with limited health literacy. Furthermore, the easy-to-use, web-based iMedConsent™ application seamlessly integrates with EHRs and with document management systems. Digitized patient signatures can be collected – solidifying patient agreement with their care plans – and those documents may be stored electronically in the EHR for easy reference throughout the enterprise.
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