Annual wellness visit: The lynchpin of care
Beyond benefits to participating physicians, an ACO provides an infrastructure of care designed to control costs and improve patient outcomes. The lynchpin of that infrastructure is the annual wellness visit, a 45-minute consultation between the patient and his or her primary care physician (PCP) paid for by Medicare.
Medicare foots the cost because annual wellness visits can improve long-term care management. During the visit, patients can discuss any concerns or considerations, along with quality of life goals and disease management issues.
Numerous benefits can result from the annual wellness visit, including:
- Attribution of the patient to an ACO (in other words, connecting the patient to the ACO for care management and quality tracking)
- Creating a health baseline that informs care decisions in the coming year
- Early disease detection/risk evaluation through tools like falls assessment, smoking cessation, and diabetes screening