ACS THRIVE was developed by the American College of Surgeons and Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness to help hospitals and surgical practices understand the cost of providing surgical care at their institutions and move toward a Value-Based Healthcare model of care.
By offering integration of clinical and patient-reported outcomes and price of care juxtaposed with cost for an institution, ACS THRIVE is charged with leading the change from a Fee-for-Service payment model to a Value-Based model.
The ACS team has successfully created template process maps for three different Episodes of Care (EOC) defined by specific CPT codes:
The ACS team has worked with sites across the country to tailor these maps to each site’s own process maps. We used Time Derived Activity Based Costing (TDABC) methodology to calculate total cost of production at the site for whichever EOC the site has chosen. Our work has broken down the cost for an institution by personnel, space, and cost of consumables used in addition to time spent to provide care.
As more sites have completed the ACS THRIVE cost exercise using this TDABC methodology, we have steadily grown a data sample for each EOC. Recently, cohorts for colon surgery and bariatric surgery met virtually to have a first look at the spread of cost between deidentified sites and the variability in process for the same procedures defined by the same CPT codes. This collaborative summit proved to be an important step in creating a community of surgeon leaders who are interested in being at the forefront of the change from a Fee-for-Service model to a Value-Based Healthcare model.
ACS THRIVE is an innovative program that could have a far-reaching impact on measuring and improving value. We welcome your organization’s participation.
ACS THRIVE is in the pilot phase and continues to welcome sites interested in learning more about and participating in our work. The team is also creating additional EOC process maps to start building cost data on more common surgical procedures.
Would you like to be a foundational member of ACS THRIVE? Please contact Anupam Dayal, Senior Project Manager, at adayal@facs.org or 312-202-5193.