Healthcare Model: Accountable Care OrganizationsThe current focus on new healthcare models is a reaction to long-standing concerns about quality, cost and efficiency. The Accountable Care Organizations model focuses on integrated healthcare to promote accountability and improve health outcomes for a defined population. The goal of integrated healthcare is to ensure that patients, especially chronically ill patients, receive the right care at the right time, avoiding unnecessary duplication of services and preventing medical errors (CMS, 2014). The following paper will analyze an ACO's ability to change healthcare in the United States. Analysis of Accountable Care OrganizationsThe Affordable Care Act seeks to reduce health care costs by encouraging doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers to form networks that coordinate patient care and become eligible to get bonuses when they provide that care more efficiently . Accountable care organizations (ACOs) hold providers jointly responsible for their patients' health by giving them financial incentives to cooperate and save money by avoiding unnecessary tests and procedures. Approximately four million Medicare beneficiaries are now part of an ACO, and along with the private sector, more than 428 provider groups have already joined (CMS, 2014). It is estimated that approximately 14% of the U.S. population is now served by an ACO (CMS, 2014). In Medicare's traditional fee-for-service payment system, doctors and hospitals generally get paid for each test and procedure. This drives up costs by rewarding suppliers who do more, even when they don't have to. ACOs continue to use fee-for-service by creating incentives to be more efficient by offering bonuses when providers keep… half the paper… and by adopting some form of contracting that encourages population management and cost minimization (Muhlestein , 2013). ACOs continue to represent only a small minority of care provided in the United States. ACOs are still a work in progress and their eventual success or failure is yet to be determined, but the Accountable Care Organization's influence on the American healthcare system continues. Many ACOs will complete a risk-based ACO contract, and their early results will influence how payers, providers, and policymakers experience future iterations of Accountable Care. If results are good, the ACO model could become the dominant form of healthcare in the United States in the next decade (Muhlestein, 2013). If the results are negative, Accountable Care Organizations may never gain a permanent place in the U.S. health care system.