10 Mistakes Accountable Care Organizations Still Make

When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced its proposed regulations for accountable care organizations (ACOs) last spring, CMS administrator Donald Berwick said "information management--making sure patients and all health care providers have the right information at the point of care--will be a core competency of ACOs."

In a new article about ACOs in the Journal of the American Medical Association, two other health policy experts reaffirm the importance of health IT, including electronic health records (EHRs), in building these organizations. At the same time, they point out that the technology is not yet up to the task.

In the paper, Stephen Shortell, dean of the school of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, and Sara Singer, of Harvard's school of public health, offer a list of 10 mistakes that ACOs may make. They are: