The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act includes a provision that allows states that are granted a federal Medicaid waiver to devise their own solutions for achieving increased access to health care and reducing costs. The state of Oregon is one state that is doing just that.Oregon is moving toward a sweeping transformation of general health and mental health services, including the creation of regional “coordinating care organizations (CCOs)” responsible for organizing the delivery of all health services for citizens in each region of the state. CCOs are the state's designated term for what have elsewhere been called “accountable care organizations” (ACOs)—the coalitions of hospitals, health systems, physicians, and other health care providers envisioned as a new model for providing coordinated, cost-effective care across populations. For more information, see
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/9/6.1.full.
