Leavitt Partners and the Brookings Institution are joining forces to form what they say is the largest accountable care collaborative in the world. The new nonprofit organization will be co-chaired by former US Health and Human Services Secretary and Utah Governor Mike Leavitt.
Accountable care is a simple concept on the surface. David Muhlestein, Senior Director of Research and Development, at Leavitt Partners describes it this way.
“We don’t want to just pay people for doing more. We want to pay people for doing better,” he says, but that is a significant challenge because it means transforming how healthcare is delivered. “It’s not just about paying things differently. It’s really about how you care for patients differently. It turns out that it’s a lot of work, a lot of effort, to rethink and reconfigure how care is being managed.”
Leavitt Partners and the Brookings Institution have both been studying the evolution of accountable care in different ways. Muhlestein says it’s time for the two organizations to come together, move from research and pilot tests towards helping players in the industry effectively scale and grow this type of care.
“It’s really the chance to start to take what we’ve been learning over the past five years and start to share those findings in a very practical way across the entire industry,” he says. “You know, the small physician group in a small, rural community, is able to say I can understand these best practices, I can implement those, and I can provide better care.”
The new nonprofit is called Accountable Care Learning Collaborative, and it will be housed at Western Governors University.
