First year of Pioneer ACO program saw small reduction in lowvalue services

A modest reduction in the use of low-value services was seen among health care practices that participated in Medicare’s Pioneer ACO program, according to recently published data in JAMA Internal Medicine. Aaron L. Schwartz, PhD, department of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues, constructed 31 claims-based measures of low-value services and analyzed data from 2009 to 2012 Medicare fee-for-service claims to assess whether the Medicare Pioneer ACO program reduced the use of low-value services. Schwartz and colleagues conducted a difference-in-differences analysis between Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries using providers enrolled in the Pioneer ACO program and those using non-ACO providers (control group), before (2009 to 2011) and after (2012) Pioneer ACO contracts began.