NAACOS Fall 2023 Recap

On September 20th-22nd, I had the pleasure of joining my AaNeel colleagues at the Fall 2023 NAACOS conference in Washington, DC. AaNeel is proud to be a part of NAACOS’s Business Partners, in a collaborative effort improve Accountable Care Organization (ACO) performance.

I enjoyed the collaboration, networking, and learning. The topics included a multitude of seminars spanning across policy, clinical, and administrative perspectives. It was great to confirm our team’s understanding and strategy through seminars such as: Secrets to the Success of High-Performing ACOs, eCQMs, MIPS CQMs and Medicare CQMs: Discussing Recent CMS Quality Reporting Proposals, MA’s Shifting Landscape and Implications for MA Risk, and Stop Physician Burnout! Using AI and ML Engaged Digital Platforms.

My colleagues and I conducted a poll of NAACOS attendees regarding which topics they are most interested in learning about. Leveraging Technology for ACOs (38.0%), v24 to v28 (23.8%), and eCQMs (19.0%), were the hot topics. Attendees were also interested in hearing more about provider engagement (14.2%).

AaNeel launched a new product that ties in most of those topics: Annex is a provider engagement technology that assists providers close gaps in care and identify risk coding opportunities at the point of care.

One session that I really enjoyed was, “Secrets to the Success of High Performing ACOs,” presented by Emily Brower of Trinity Health, Kevin Kearns of Millennium Healthcare, David Klebonis of Doctors ACO, and Keith Fernandez of Privia. I appreciated that they discussed the challenges and failures of their organizations. Most presentations

always focus on successes, but for those of us that have paved the way in value-based care, we know that not every initiative will be a glowing success. It’s motivating to know that even the most successful organizations suffer from challenges. Some highlights from the presentation include: Privia has a formal leadership program to help engage providers. They just graduated 45 physicians from the program. This program has been instrumental in building culture since they have over 4000 physicians nationwide. Furthermore, Privia has realized that developing a robust care management program has not been effective. From the experience of the speaker, he had hired 100 nurses in his prior role, and couldn’t identify a return on investment or improvement in care. He dismantled this program. Specifically, he indicated that access to care has to be the foundation to a successful value-based program. David spoke about the importance of provider engagement. It was a very “real” session.

Speaking of provider engagement, one session was specifically devoted to “Engaging Providers to Drive VBC Success.” They highlighted several strategies that each organization should consider, including: distribution formula, competition, CME, having a broad definition of what is important in VBC, keeping it clinically meaningful and patient specific, and encouraging transparency about how the money is being spent.

No matter what initiatives the administration is looking to implement, it seems to be unanimous that physician engagement must be a focus. Physicians are directly working with the patients, and without physician engagement, it will be impossible to truly improve the quality of care and reduce costs.

Contact us today to learn more about how AaNeel’s Annex helps engage providers and reduce physician burnout.