What is needed: “a really good, roll-up-your-sleeves collaboration among all stakeholder parties, that will help the leaders of some ACOs become the most successful.”

This report describes what we have experienced. In the fee-for-service payment method, data is siloed and there is no pressing business or financial incentive for data sharing let alone collaboration between providers that simply submit their bill and report and move on down the road.

Shared risk models such as ACOs require Meaningful Collaboration between medical stakeholders to limit redundant costs, increase efficiency of treatment and to decide as a stakeholder group what is most cost effective treatment for the specific patient. In this model, the patient, medical providers, payors and regulators all share risk and must collaborate in creating and delivering the most cost effective treatment.

Healthcare needs collaboration tools including EMR vendor independent collaboration platforms that allow all medical stakeholders to share information held in different information systems as well as HIPAA compliant, easily accessible collaboration platform that is patient and medical provider centric rather than EMR centric. This is the Vision of Meaningful Collaboration project.