OIG Agrees with CMS: Accountable Care Organizations Save Money and Improve Care

​Medicare Shared Savings Program accountable care organizations (ACOs) saved almost $1 billion and generally improved the quality of the care they provided in their first three years of operation, according to an August 2017 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General (OIG). OIG reviewed data from 428 ACOs who served 9.7 million beneficiaries and compared costs and quality data collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) with similar data for non-ACO Medicare-participating hospitals. In addition to the cost savings, ACOs achieved improvement on 82% of the individual quality measures collected by CMS and outperformed their non-ACO counterparts on 81% of the measures.