Healthcare data platform company Innovaccer has launched ACO Advisor, a new free online tool that uses publicly available data to advise Accountable Care Organizations on how to reduce costs and increase revenues.

“It has been six years since the ACO program was started, but still most of them are leaving money on the table by not assuming enough risks,” Abhinav Shashank, CEO cofounder at Innovaccer, said in a statement. “And these dollar values are mostly associated with utilization rate, network coordination, and timely engagement of care teams and patients.”

Innovaccer works one-on-one with ACOs to help them make the most of shared savings programs. To develop the new tool, the company tapped its team of ACO experts as well as learnings from those consultations and data from CMS.

“The basic intention behind this is that multiple kinds of users are kind of struggling with this entire subject in terms of ‘How do I understand what my core opportunities are and then we really focus on it … in terms of improving outcomes and being able to negotiate shared savings for providers,” Cofounder and Chief Operating Officer Sandeep Gupta told MobiHealthNews. “We put a lot of analytics behind it and we’re working with new customers across the board and have helped them to save hundreds of millions of dollars in the past couple of years. We wanted to share some of the learnings we’ve had, and just look at all the data that’s there, that Medicare publishes and multiple other data streams, and synthesize all of our learnings. … So this is a tool so that they can understand what are the top opportunities they can address in the short term, and on a longer time frame.”

The idea behind providing a free tool is both to potentially entice additional customers and to improve the performance of shared savings programs overall.

“We want to be supportive of the entire transition towards value-based care and we want to do things that really push everyone who is partaking in this transition, irrespective of whether they are customers or not,” Gupta said.

Users can search for their own ACO (or a competitor’s) and see CMS data around their risk, adjusted risk, number of beneficiaries, and more. They can also see savings opportunities highlighted. These might include reducing avoidable emergency department visits, reducing readmissions, or more accurately coding risk, Vibhuti Agrawal, Innovaccer’s director of analytics, told MobiHealthNews.

As well as perusing the information online, users can have a report delivered to them, and can reach out to Innovaccer’s experts for additional information.

“We have aligned this tool as a way to reach out to our experts, because we understand as [providers] are moving to a two-sided risk contract, it can become very overwhelming to them,” Agrawal told MobiHealthNews. "So we want to help out the community by providing them with our learnings so they can build upon more shared savings and improve their revenue.”

The free tool can be accessed here.