Accountable Care Organization: Is It Early Approach in Saudi Arabia?

Abstract

Accountable Care Organization (ACO) is trying to evolve all around the world moving towards and keeping cost-effective at a minimum, providing a better quality of care and improving health outcomes in a patient-centered manner, adopting technology to organize and coordinate care between health care network, primary health care and hospitals to facilitate care and management, monitoring, and reporting quality and cost data to track patient across health care providers by allowing access to patient electronic medical file, and avoiding duplication of services and prevent medical errors. Objectives and Aims: The main objectives of this study is to find out the association of demographic data and the level of knowledge, attitude and confidence of the physicians of various age, gender, specialty, area of work and their clinical and administrative field experiences. This is to assess the ability to establish a successful basement to build a new trend in healthcare system “Accountable Care Organizations” (ACOs) in Saudi Arabia. Results: This prospective and cross-sectional study was conducted on 321 physicians with an average age of 42.8 ±11 SD. Results showed the average score for knowledge of all respondents was 65.2 out of 100 with ±15.7 SD. The overall average of the modes of the attitude was 6.8 out of 10; While the overall average of the modes of the confidence was 5.9 out of 10. Conclusion: This study was conducted to assess physicians’ knowledge, attitude and confidence toward implementation of ACO in Saudi Arabia. The current study suggested that there was no significant difference between the level of knowledge of ACOs between males and females and between the specialties (consultant, specialist, or resident). Results showed that there was no significant difference in attitude between males and females neither there was a significant difference between different specialties consultants, specialists and residents. Moreover, those physicians with administrative experience had better attitudes towards ACO than those with clinical experience. Males showed higher confidence compared with females. There were similarities in results with no significant changes between consultants, specialists and residents with predominantly average mode of what is considered as moderate confidence. This study is confirming that Saudi Arabia is ready for the transformation and vision of 2030 to adopt the ACO health care system with this knowledge, attitude and confidence of the Saudi physicians.