Perceived Ethics Dilemmas Among Pioneer Accountable Care Organizations.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This study of Pioneer accountable care organizations (ACOs) suggests that the ACO model is creating moral distress for physicians and business leaders in seven critical ways:Despite an overall sense of optimism associated with the ACO model, our research identified an underlying sense of moral distress at most sites. A clear opportunity exists for ACOs to use a more comprehensive, coordinated approach to proactively resolving ethical dilemmas while continuing the march toward risk-based contracts.

2013 Winning Essay: The Accountable Care Paradigm Shift: New Ethical Considerations.

The current state of our health care system is analogous to the status of science that Kuhn describes as "a proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals" [27]. ACOs represent a paradigm shift in the way health care is delivered. As with any dramatic public policy change, ethical issues will arise. These are surmountable challenges, and with open communication, physicians such as the Midstate group can partner effectively with hospital systems to ensure the delivery of quality, evidence-based care while at the same reorienting the culture to be attentive to its fiduciary responsibilities.

Ethical challenges for accountable care organizations: a structured review.

BACKGROUND: Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are proliferating as a solution to the cost crisis in American health care, and already involve as many as 31 million patients. ACOs hold clinicians, group practices, and in many circumstances hospitals financially accountable for reducing expenditures and improving their patients' health outcomes. The structure of health care affects the ethical issues arising in the practice of medicine; therefore, like all health care organizational structures, ACOs will experience ethical challenges. No framework exists to assist key ACO stakeholders in identifying or managing these challenges. METHODS: We conducted a structured review of the medical ACO literature using qualitative content analysis to inform identification of ethical challenges for ACOs. RESULTS: Our analysis found infrequent discussion of ethics as an explicit concern for ACOs. Nonetheless, we identified nine critical ethical challenges, often described in other terms, for ACO stakeholders. Leaders could face challenges regarding fair resource allocation (e.g., about fairly using ACOs' shared savings), protection of professionals' ethical obligations (especially related to the design of financial incentives), and development of fair decision processes (e.g., ensuring that beneficiary representatives on the ACO board truly represent the ACO's patients). Clinicians could perceive threats to their professional autonomy (e.g., through cost control measures), a sense of dual or conflicted responsibility to their patients and the ACO, or competition with other clinicians. For patients, critical ethical challenges will include protecting their autonomy, ensuring privacy and confidentiality, and effectively engaging them with the ACO. DISCUSSION: ACOs are not inherently more or less "ethical" than other health care payment models, such as fee-for-service or pure capitation. ACOs' nascent development and flexibility in design, however, present a time-sensitive opportunity to ensure their ethical operation, promote their success, and refine their design and implementation by identifying, managing, and conducting research into the ethical issues they might face.

An ethical framework for the responsible leadership of accountable care organizations.

Using the ethical concepts of co-fiduciary responsibility in patient care and of preventive ethics, this article provides an ethical framework to guide physician and lay leaders of accountable care organizations. The concept of co-fiduciary responsibility is based on the ethical concept of medicine as a profession, which was introduced into the history of medical ethics in the 18th century. Co-fiduciary responsibility applies to everyone who influences the processes of patient care: physicians, organizational leaders, patients, and patients' surrogates. A preventive ethics approach to co-fiduciary responsibility requires leaders of accountable care organizations to create organizational cultures of fiduciary professionalism that implement and support the following: improving quality based on candor and accountability, reasserting the physician's professional role in the informed consent process, and constraining patients' and surrogates' autonomy. Sustainable organizational cultures of fiduciary professionalism will require commitment of organizational resources and constant vigilance over the intellectual and moral integrity of organizational culture.