Benchmarking Implications: Analysis of Medicare Accountable Care Organizations Spending Level and Quality of Care.

Early evidence has shown that Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have achieved some success in improving the quality of care and reducing Medicare costs. However, it has been argued that the ACO rewarding model may disproportionately affect relatively low-spending (LS; considered as efficient) organizations that have fewer options to cut unnecessary services compared with high-spending (HS; inefficient) organizations. We conducted a cross-sectional retrospective study to compare ACO financial and quality of care performance between HS-ACO and LS-ACO.