title: An academic health center sees both challenges and enabling forces as it creates an accountable care organization.
abstract: Health care reform presents academic health centers with an opportunity to test new systems of care, such as accountable care organizations (ACOs), that are intended to improve patients' health and well-being, mitigate the anticipated shortage in primary care providers, and bend the cost curve. In its ongoing efforts to develop an ACO, the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, an academic health center, has found helpful a rapidly evolving competitive environment and insurers willing to experiment with new models of care. But the center has also encountered six types of barriers: conceptual, financial, cultural, regulatory, organizational, and historical. How this academic health center has faced these barriers offers valuable lessons to other health systems engaged in creating ACOs.
authors.affiliation: Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. tallia@umdnj.edu
authors.forename: Alfred F
authors.initials: AF
authors.lastname: Tallia
authors.forename: Jenna
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Howard
mesh_terms: D000046:Academic Medical Centers / Q000458:organization & administration*; D060866:Accountable Care Organizations / Q000458:organization & administration*; D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D005260:Female; D017048:Health Care Costs; D018166:Health Care Reform / Q000458:organization & administration; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009936:Organizational Innovation; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians' / Q000191:economics; D015397:Program Evaluation; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D014481:United States