The goal of the ACE demonstration is to improve quality and efficiency of care, price and quality transparency for improved decision making, to increase collaboration/communication among providers and patients, and to generate savings which will be shared between providers, beneficiaries and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Typically, Medicare patients receive care from multiple physicians and sometimes across multiple care settings for individual episodes of care (defined as inpatient stays and including both Part A and Part B services in this demonstration). This demonstration tests whether improvements in quality of care result from aligning financial incentives between hospitals and physicians in such a way that it facilitates and improves the coordination of care for every patient.
The market-based mechanisms that are being used to achieve improved quality and efficiency are: bundled payment, competitive bidding, gain-sharing and shared savings.