By Noah Tong, for Fierce Healthcarel:
Among numerous tweaks, CMS reduced the beneficiary alignment minimum for new entrant accountable care organizations from 5,000 to 4,000. It also reduced minimums for high needs populations. A 10% buffer will be applied across all ACO types, allowing an ACO to temporarily drop below the new beneficiary minimum, but an ACO cannot remain below the threshold for more than one of the model’s remaining years, according to the newly released standards.