Accountable Care Units: A Disruptive Innovation in Acute Care Delivery.

Accountable Care Units are a disruptive innovation that has moved care on acute care units from a traditional silo model, in which each discipline works separately from all others, to one in which multiple disciplines work together with patients and their families to move patients safely through their hospital stay. This article describes the "what," "how," and "why" of the Accountable Care Units model as it has evolved in different locations across a single health system and includes the lessons learned as different units and hospitals continue working to implement the model in their complex care environments.

Reorganizing a hospital ward as an accountable care unit.

Traditional hospital wards are not specifically designed as effective clinical microsystems. The feasibility and sustainability of doing so are unclear, as are the possible outcomes. To reorganize a traditional hospital ward with the traits of an effective clinical microsystem, we designed it to have 4 specific features: (1) unit-based teams, (2) structured interdisciplinary bedside rounds, (3) unit-level performance reporting, and (4) unit-level nurse and physician coleadership.