Brown & Toland Physicians Helps Generate Savings, Improve Quality for Medicare’s Pioneer Accountable Care Program

Financial and quality results released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) earlier this week showed that Brown & Toland Physicians’ again helped generate significant savings for the Pioneer Accountable Care Organization program in 2013 and helped improve the care of the patients in the program. 

“We are of course delighted that we continued to help improve the quality of care of the Bay Area patients in the Medicare Pioneer accountable care program, and that we were able to generate saving for the Medicare program,” said Richard Fish, Brown & Toland chief executive officer. “We will continue to work to refine our approaches to improve the care we deliver to our patients.” The 23 healthcare organizations participating in the Pioneer program generated a savings of more than $96 million for Medicare.  Brown & Toland helped save Medicare $4.5 million of that total. Additionally, Brown & Toland was one of the 11 Medicare Pioneer participants that will earn shared savings from its participation in the Medicare Pioneer project.

The mean quality score among Pioneer ACOs increased by 19 percent, from 71.8 percent in 2012 to 85.2 percent in 2013, and the Pioneer healthcare organizations showed improvements in 28 of the 33 quality measures, experiencing average improvements of 14.8 percent across all quality measures, which include screening for future fall risk, screening for tobacco use, smoking cessation programs, and controlling high blood pressure.