Medicare Accountable Care Organizations: Quality Performance by Geographic Categories.

Purpose. This policy brief continues the work of the RUPRI Center analyzing the performance of Medicare Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) serving rural areas. In this brief, we examine the differences in performance on four domains of quality measures and the overall quality score among Medicare Shared Savings ACOs with different levels of rural presence. Key Findings. (1) ACOs located in rural counties performed better than those in urban counties on Care Coordination/Patient Safety, Preventive Health, and At-Risk Population domain scores and the overall quality score in 2014. (2) Urban ACOs performed better than ACOs in other geographic categories on the Patient/Caregiver Experience score in 2014. (3) ACOs in all geographic categories improved their quality performance between 2014 and 2015.