I hope that this gives you more clarity for you to understand the impact to your operation.
My last blog gave you an overall feeling on the understanding of what ACO is and how it will relate to you and your operation.
The new hospital value-based purchasing program for Medicare that will reward hospitals for providing high quality, safe care for patients. Organizations that have Medicare patients will be looking at their budgets more closely to fund their organization. Especially 
hospitals and nursing homes that are over 65% Medicare patients.
Hospitals are tightening their belt. Retuning operational with more efficiencies in terms of expense and accomplish cultural diversity without compromising qualities.
How do you maintain quality and have proper staffing too?
Ideas as you move forward:
· Always look to the future for solutions that are for today that is sustainability over time and in terms of green/energy efficiency.
· Take into considerations menu trends that drive taste and economics scale
· Increase cultural food diversity in menu needs and how your environment is set up to reflect. Equipment that has multi functionality and reflects healthy needs/green.
· Review any trends or insights on what is going on and how it can influence equipment selection, capital expenditures purchases today or back-of-the-house operational needs would be an added bonus to gearing up.
· Being more proactive not reactive to the situation. Purchasing oven for today but looking for multifunctional aspects. Purchasing a multi temp cart that can offer various uses-emergency room trays, evening trays, and guest trays left up on a floor
· Reallocation of staff/cross training
· Planning for 3 to 5 year strategies, with next steps and focus on moving forward to keep up with the best of the best.
Here is a link that I thought would be interesting to you that is related to what I am writing about in this blog. http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20110107/NEWS/110109980/#
This relates to the hospital having better patient satisfaction surveys (press ganey type surveys), shorter length of patient stays and performance based initiative. If you are proactive and thinking about more efficiency, menu diversity, etc…It makes a difference in how effective you are with you patients and customers too.
ACO, healthcare reform, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and whatever terminology is out there about the changes that are happening are all related back to value-based, incentive payments to hospitals. Those payments will be based on either how well the hospitals perform on certain quality measures, or how much the hospitals’ performance improves on certain measures from their performance during a baseline period. According to the CMS, the higher the performance, the higher the incentive payment will be.
Transparent communication lends itself to a positive impact and better results.
What are you doing to prepare for this? How are you communicating these changes to your employees? Your patients? Your customers? Your vendors?
MARSHA DIAMOND 